Happy Centennial, Cash!

One Tuesday back in 2009 I showed you some little turtles in the drawer of my cash register. In that post I promised more about the cash register in three years time. Now is the time!

Today my cash register is 100 years old!

In August 1994, Jerry and I visited New Mexico. We took a day trip over to Las Vegas. I don't really remember why we went over there. Maybe it was a play day with Peggy. I have no real connection with the town. My parents and older sisters all went to New Mexico Highlands University. I was spared. The only thing I really remember of our trips to Las Vegas to see Jack's Aunt Gladie was our excursions to the nearby Dairy Queen where I'd get a Dilly Bar.

One of our stops on our visit was an antique store on the plaza. They had a bronze National cash register for sale. I was working for NCR at the time and had been wanting to get a cash register. I admired it but decided that it would be too difficult to get it back to California.

Here it is in the antique store.

We went back to Los Alamos without a cash register. The cash register kept calling to me so I decided that we probably could have it shipped. We went back the next day and bought it.

We took it to a business in Los Alamos that ships things. They built a crate with 5/8" plywood, removed the "Amount Purchased" top sign and glass, reinforced the purchase price that was showing (I don't know how to have nothing showing in the amount purchased window) and packed it in foam and styrofoam peanuts. They knew what they were doing. The cash register got here in the same condition we left it.

Its condition isn't perfect but it's pretty good. Its locks are missing their keys. Its Finish C "should be highly polished and clear lacquered with a car quality lacquer, to protect the polished finish" but it's not very shiny.

The people at the antique store told us that they were about its third owners. Its first owner was in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. I think they told me that the son of the first owner used it in a shop in Las Vegas. It then went to the antique store. Now I have it.

I can't find the receipt but the price tag you see in the picture survives.

Ignore the "c 1912"! We know it's actual age!

On the underside of the cash drawer is the guarantee that the cash register will be mechanically correct for two years after it was delivered. It shows that it was built for A. A. Witherspoon of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. It was delivered April 3, 1912.

You'll notice that the Register No. and Size recorded on the guarantee are the same as on the front of the cash register.

This means that this is the original drawer. The cash register isn't cobbled together from pieces!

There is a modification that probably voided the guarantee. The spring that pushes the cash drawer out broke. There is another spring tied to what's left of the original one.

To celebrate my cash register's 100th birthday, here it is making its cheerful Ding! when it registers a sale:

My 100-year-old cash register!

Robert Nelson

Robert Nelson died recently. He was an experimental filmmaker.

I hadn't heard of Robert Nelson but I had seen a few of his films in college.

I was a member of the Tech Weathermen. The club had nothing to do with the Weather Underground. The Tech Weathermen was formed by my friend Walter Kubilius mostly to put on film festivals. It had some beer busts, too, I think.

Walter would program the little festivals with experimental films, safety films, pornographic films and certainly other interesting genres (I wish I had a better memory).

Walter included some of Robert Nelson's films in these programs. I had only vague memories of these films.

One that is on YouTube is "Oh Dem Watermelons." (WARNING: If you would be offended by a scene featuring a naked woman and a watermelon, don't click on that link!) My memory of that film was simply the last scene with the watermelon chasing the people up Lombard Street. (That scene involves the same technique we used in my own "Silly Backward Antics" video.) The music is by Stephen Foster and Steve Reich who has gone on to become an influential composer. Thank you, YouTube, for letting me relive that film.

The other Robert Nelson film Walter showed us was "Hot Leatherette." I seem to recall its big scene was a loop of a pickup rolling down a cliff. Over and over and over. If anyone can point me to a video of this film I'd be forever grateful.

For your convenience, here is "Oh Dem Watermelons" (but if you're interested in seeing it you've probably already watched it when you clicked on the link above):


There are a few other films I remember from the Tech Weathermen Film Festivals. One was "Tale of a Tailgate." This was a safety film from the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (I think it was still called that then). It taught us that we need to aware that equipment can malfunction and we should always prepare for the worst. We got to see someone operating the hydraulics that lift a truck's liftgate. In the film something goes horribly wrong and the lift falls and lands on the operator's foot. That's bad. He should have stood more to the side so that such a malfunction wouldn't result in tragedy. We got to see the failure from several different angles and in slow motion. Gripping!

The movie that still gives me nightmares was one where I was in charge of running the projector. Some of the films were 16mm. Those were shown with projectors in the theater's projection booth. Some were 8mm films. We set up projectors in the middle of the theater for those. I got to run the 8mm projector for one of the pornographic films. The film featured a woman being man's best friend's best friend. And we're not talking just in the style of South Park's "Red Rocket" episode. No, she really put her teeth into her role. Well, maybe not her teeth but something quite close.

The film broke before the climax of the movie. There were boos. I don't know how a stoned person sitting in the dark could thread the film through the projector and get it going again while being booed but I managed. It broke again. Again, I managed to get it going, boos and all. After it broke a third time we gave up on that film. I am so glad I didn't have to see the end of that one.

I wish I had a better memory. I'd like to remember what other movies I got to see in these little festivals (except for those that give me nightmares).

I'm glad I had enough of a recollection of Robert Nelson's movies to search for them after YouTube came along. Now if only someone would post "Hot Leatherette."

By the way, I am a member of the Weather Underground these days! My home weather station uploads its data to their site and they let the world know what the weather is at my house. You might have noticed their weather widget at the top left corner of this blog.

Pancho Villa Car

The most common way that people, other than friends and family, find posts on my blog is through Google's image search for "pancho villa death car." The first result is the Wikipedia image I linked to in my story about our trip to Chihuahua, Mexico. I didn't include the photo, I just linked to it. When the searchers click on that image, they're taken to the August, 2008, archive of my blog. The image isn't there and the link to it buried deep down in the page. This probably leaves them confused and dismayed.

So, for the possible convenience and pleasure of people searching for it, here is...

Pancho Villa Death Car

This is taken from Wikipedia's article of Pancho Villa (where we're told we can copy, distribute and transmit it).

Chuckbert's got a brand new bag

A new camera bag, that is!

I love Costco. I can always find something I just can't live without. I had been thinking that it's time to get an SLR digital camera. I'd look over their selection and think it over a bit longer before splurging. But you know Costco, the next time you go they won't have what you had seen last time you were there.

Recently, they had a big display of Nikon D90 boxes right as you go in the door. This camera can do it all. It comes with two lenses, an 18-55mm zoom and a 70-300mm zoom. It has autofocus and manual focus. It includes a 4GB memory card. It comes with a bag to hold everything. IT TAKES MOVIES!

Chuckbert, get it now! It might not be here next time!

I'm glad I waited. I got a Nikon D90! Then and there!

I've made a very simple movie with it (see my previous post).

It took many of the pictures in my recent posts. This weekend I made a couple of outings to try it out some more.

I headed out east through Ramona and Julian, then south through Cuyamaca Rancho State Park to Pine Valley, west to El Cajon then home. For some reason I wasn't terribly inspired to take many pictures. I should have spent time off the highway in Cuyamaca but I just zipped through.

Here come a few pictures from that trip.

But first, in the early 80s I took some photography classes at Palomar College. The first classes used manual cameras and black and white 120 film. We used manual cameras so we learned how photography works. We used medium-format film because it's easier for beginners to handle than 35mm film. We learned that in bright sunlight that you needed a known exposure so we just needed to learn a simple formula for setting the aperture and shutter speed to achieve that exposure. No light meter was necessary. We learned how the aperture setting affected the depth of field. These were good classes.

One assignment was about symmetry. I got 9 points out of 10 on this picture of Ramona's town hall:

Part of the problem is there is writing above one of the windows and that draws your eye, breaking the symmetry.

Here's what Town Hall looked like on Friday:

Why'd they have to block it with trees?

Beyond Julian, I took the obligatory picture of a windmill and dead tree:

Here's a 180° panorama of five pictures stitched together. It was taken from the spot Jerry and I watched a very good episode of the Leonid Meteor Shower in 2000.

Colleen wanted to see the Unarius Academy of Science when she visited several years ago but we ran out of steam before we could get to El Cajon. I walked past it on this outing but couldn't bring myself to go in.

Jerry and I went to the Wild Animal Park on Memorial Day to get some fresh air and pictures.

Here's a picture Jerry took of me with his phone at the WAP. I'm sporting my new instrument:

And here are a few pictures my new camera and I took of animals:

I don't know if this is the February 14th or April 12th arrival. It's a boy in either case.

I have a new gadget!

What was I thinking?

A few days ago I had a rather severe senior moment. Or junior moment. Or something.

I was doing my job. I was writing some Java code and made a weird typo. I think I was trying to type a left parenthesis and went way off target. I suddenly had a strong feeling that I had done the keystrokes that I would have done had I been typing on an IBM 029 Keypunch.

Through most of my time at New Mexico Tech we wrote our programs on decks of punch cards. I was good at touch typing on them. I knew how to type all the special characters.

So when I felt that I had regressed to my key punching days, I panicked.

I searched for a chart of the key punch's keyboard layout (isn't the Internet wonderful?) to see if I had indeed been confused about the kind of keyboard I was using.

I wasn't.

Neither of the key punch's parentheses was anywhere near where my misguided finger was going. I just slipped. I hope.

But this gave me the opportunity to reminisce about my college days and to be amazed at how much things have changed in such a short time.

It's been more than 30 years since I've used keypunches. But there is one behavior that I picked up from using them that I wish I could unlearn.

If you look at the keyboard layout chart you'll see that there are "Numeric" and "Alpha" keys where a normal keyboard's "Shift" keys are. Letters on a keypunch are all capitals. Pressing the Numeric key and a letter key gives you the special character on the letter's key. Numeric-N gives you the left parenthesis, for example.

In normal use of the keypunch you would rarely use the "Alpha" key. The Alpha key would be used only when a program card is used. The program card could set to make certain columns to behave as if you were pressing the Numeric key when typing. If anything shows up in the first six columns of a line of Fortran code, it has to be numbers so you could make a program card that effectively presses the Numeric key for you when typing in the first six columns. If for some reason you needed to type an alphabetic character in one of those first six columns when such a program card was used, you'd have to press the Alpha key. I was an expert at making useful program cards that would do numeric shifting, tabbing, duplicating, and whatever.

Anyway, I used only the left shift key when typing on a keypunch.

To this day, I use only the left shift key on a computer keyboard. When I need a capital Q, A, Z or an exclamation point, I press the shift key with my pinky and my ring finger takes over the pinky's duty. My ring finger gets quite a workout if I have to type something like "WES SAW A WAX SAX!"

I suppose I don't really need to use the right shift key but I wish I could.

A-TEN-shun!

I usually don't pay attention to ads on web sites. I especially try to ignore the ones that have annoying animations going on. A year or so ago, there were some ads on the New York Times site for Design Within Reach. Their ads were simply their name on a red background. For some reason I checked them out. And spent hours looking through their products. I've gone back to drool over and over again.

I want a second house that we can decorate with contemporary furnishings.

One of the stops of our trip last month was Penzeys Spices in Santa Monica. Just across the street from Penzeys happened to be a DWR store. Oh, boy! Oh, boy! Oh, boy!

One of the things I wanted to see was a miniature of a molded plywood elephant designed by Charles and Ray Eames. The only one they had was in their display case. Jerry bought it for me!

I hadn't heard of Charles Eames and the Eames Chair until Charles Eames gave the commencement address at my college graduation.

I wish I could remember the address. I'm sure it was full of wonderful ideas to help us to do great things with our lives. The one thing I remember is that he showed us his film "The Powers of Ten." My friend Walter Kubilius was excited that we were going to see Mr. Eames and his movie. If it hadn't been for his excitement, I might have let the whole experience pass as just another inspirational speech. Sadly, Charles Eames died just three months after that address.

I'm glad I know a little about the Eameses. And I now have my own little Eames-designed piece. Now I'll have to go back and get a chair.

"The Powers of Ten" is a very interesting little movie. I hope you watch and enjoy it.

Happy Powers of Ten day!

It was Fate

There was a hobby that Jack introduced me to that I embraced completely.

For a long time I was fascinated by the paranormal.

Out of the blue, Jack got me an issue of Fate magazine. I guess I really enjoyed what I read. Jack got me a subscription to the magazine!

One of the first issues I got in the mail really got me hooked.

The article "Table Up! or How to Tilt a Table" got the ball rolling. This is a way to get answers to all of your questions.

It was easy. Three people sit at the east, south and west sides of a card table. You then rub your hands together until they are warm then place your hands on the table so that your thumbs are touching and your pinkies are touching the person's pinkies next to you. You then chant "Table Up! Table Up! Table Up!" After a short time the legs on the north side of the table rise off of the floor! The table then will answer your questions. You tell it to dip up and down to give the answers. For example, for a yes/no question, you could have it dip once for "yes" and twice for "no." I suppose you need to give it an option like three dips for "I'm not telling!"

It actually worked! Three of us got out the card table, sat around it, did the chanting, and, miracle of miracles!, the legs on the north side of the table rose from the floor! It did its dipping to answer our questions!

I can't remember what sort of questions we asked. I certainly don't remember if the answers were very accurate. But it was a miracle that the table ignored the laws of gravity and dipped out answers.

This led me to the 130s section of Mesa Public Library. I must have checked out every book of their paranormal collection.

I investigated dreams. I studied the Tarot. I got a Ouiji board. I read about UFOs. I thought about telepathy and psychokinesis.

A weird thing about the Ouiji board was that whenever Peggy was on the other side of the planchette, the board would give very rude or obscene answers. I guess Peggy was channelling unhappy spirits. I hope they have found their peace.

I never got good at reading the Tarot cards. I probably needed a teacher. Like most of the things I learned outside of school, I was self-taught. Book learning about mystical things isn't the best way to go. The knowledge probably has to be passed empathetically from master to student.

But mostly I learned about testing hypotheses.

I never saw that any of these mystical activities were shown to be real through reproducible tests.

Fate had features where readers would send in their proofs of survival (of this plane's life) and of mystic experiences. Most were rather silly. One woman told about waking up one night to see an otherworldly surgeon operating on her chronically sore hips. She woke up the next morning and the pain she had experienced for years was gone! She had scars on her hips that were proof that she had had the overnight surgery! Even though I was trying to be a believer and I was rather young, my eyes rolled and I thought, "Lady, you have stretch marks. Maybe you lost some weight and your hips aren't working as hard holding you up."

I couldn't be a believer. But I still have fond memories of my time trying to find more in this universe than can be experienced by our five traditional senses.

This hobby laid an egg

Chickens.

"Son, you want to raise chickens."

No, I didn't.

Another of Jack's hobby ideas was for me to be a chicken rancher. He was serious. He bought me books on the activity. This would be a 4-H project. I'd get a merit badge and he'd get eggs and chickens on the table.

An aside: I was in a 4-H club. Its focus was on electronics. I made a toolbox that was supposed to hold all of my electronics equipment. It was a simple plywood box with a hinged lid with a hasp we could lock it with. I never used it. It would have been pretty useless for tools. There was nothing in it to keep it organized.

I had mixed experiences in my 4-H career.

One year I went to a statewide 4-H competition where I demonstrated making an extension cord. To make things go smoothly, my 4-H leader had me precut the insulation at the proper places. In the demonstration I simply pantomimed the cutting. I removed the insulation from the wires on one end of the cord, fed it through the plug and tried to tie the Underwriter's knot that keeps the cord from being pulled out of the plug.

I tried and tried but the wires were too short for the knot. After struggling a long time (and after the judges told me to relax) I realized that I was working on the wrong end of the cord. Because there were different plugs on the ends of the cord, one end's wires needed to be shorter than the other's. I was working with the wrong end. I went well beyond my allotted time. I didn't win an award.

Electronics wasn't the only thing I did for 4-H.

I kept bees. For some reason, they gave me credit for entomology. I wasn't studying bugs. I would have thought that beekeeping would have been a 4-H category of its own.

And I cooked. I won a blue ribbon in the county fair for the biscuits I entered in the 4-H category. That let me send some biscuits to the state fair. No ribbons came back to me.

Chickens.

I read the books on raising chickens. There were many unpleasant things about raising chickens.

For one thing, you had to kill them. I didn't look forward to that. Poor things.

And you got to be an amateur veterinarian. One activity in the book that looked like was in my future was caponizing the roosters-to-be. The thought of castrating the little chickens scared the heck out of me.

The chicken ranch was going to be in the back yard around the shed. I think that we were going to convert the shed into a chicken coop.

I don't know how close we came to rounding up the initial flock of chickens.

But Chris came first!

Jack had a friend who had a golden retriever. Karen was in love with that dog. The pooch became a parent (I can't remember whether it was the mother or the father). The friend gave us, well, gave Karen, one of the litter. This was around Christmas, 1968. He was named Golden Duke's Christmas (after his father). Chris for short.

Thank god for Chris.

He got the part of the yard that was going to be for the chickens.

NO CHICKENS!

Chris and Karen, January 1969

Thank you, Chris!

Red hot poker

Jack's choices of hobbies for me weren't always as successful as beekeeping.

Out of nowhere he gave me a book on how to play poker. I don't remember ever expressing an interest in the game.

The book was filled with the obvious information about the probabilities of filling your inside straights and how likely your two pairs will be beat at a table of four players.

The most interesting parts of the book were about the psychology of the game.

Much of the book was about how to play in a weekly game against a regular group.

We learned how to observe the mannerisms of our friends to understand when they're bluffing and when they have an exceptional hand. We learned how to encourage our friends to give away information through these signals. Of course it taught us how not to have such bad habits ourselves.

It taught us how to win but not win so much that our buddies stop playing. If one of the guys is looking like he's about to drop out of the Friday night game, we were told how to start losing some of our money to him so he'd be encouraged to stay in the game and lose much more money to us.

There were many problems with taking up poker for fun and profit (mostly for profit).

Among them:

1. I was a kid (in high school, but still a kid).
2. Without a lot of money.
3. Who didn't know anybody with money.

But mostly it seemed to be teaching me how to cultivate friendships in order to take as much of their money as I could. That didn't interest me.

There must have been tips on how to win against people we've never played against. But you probably have to get good at the game by first cleaning out your friends' bank accounts.

I never played poker for money.

I wonder why Jack thought I'd be interested in poker for a living at that time.

"Here, little number cruncher, you can make a living at what you're good at."

"Here's something I wish I could have done. Make me proud."

"This is your last best hope."

"Get rich quick."

I'll never know.

Schadenfreude

Jack wasn't always uninvolved in my leisure time. Sometimes he was very involved.

He'd choose my hobbies for me.

One of the hobbies he chose for me was beekeeping. I didn't like honey back then. I'm not much of a fan of the stuff still. Give me jam for my biscuits any day. So this wasn't the most satisfying hobby for me.

But beekeeping was an interesting activity. It let me see what is the rather miraculous process of little insects gathering nectar and pollen and turning it into more little insects and wax and honey.

We got hives from Sears that we had to put together and paint. We filled the frames with sheets of foundation for the little bees to build their combs on.  Jack got me "The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture." We had the jumpsuits, gloves, and hoods that would let us work with the bees without getting stung.  Much.

We ordered the bees from Sears (is there nothing you can't get from Sears?). They came in the mail in wooden boxes with screen sides. Each box held three pounds of worker bees and a few drones and a little box with a queen and a few attendants. There was a can of sugar water that kept them fed for the days they were in the mail.  The queen's box had a plug made out of sugar that the bees would eat through to release the queen. The time it took to release her gave them time to accept her as their leader.

We'd don our protective clothes, open a box of bees, shake them into their prepared hive, hang the queen's box between two frames, put the lid on and wait.

A week later we opened the hives to remove the emptied queen's box. The bees had started building combs! This was fascinating.

My career as an apiarist had begun.

Each year we'd harvest the honey. We didn't have the equipment to spin the honey out of the combs so we'd just hack the combs into squares and put them in plastic boxes. These would get sold at work much like Girl Scout cookies. But better...people got their money's worth. I don't think I was involved in the marketing of the honey. Whew!

Those bees terrorized me for years. The hives were set up in the back yard near the gate that took us to the parking spots behind the house. The bees' flight path took them across the walk up to the gate at low altitude. Now and then one would get caught in someone's hair. Ouch.

When you're a good beekeeper you don't need the protective clothes. You know how to handle the bees without getting them riled up. We never got good at it.

My happiest day at beekeeping was when Jack was doing something with the bees by himself. He got into his jumpsuit, zipped on the veil and went to work. He didn't get the veil completely closed.

The bees found the weak spot in his protection. He got a face full of stings. He was quite the dancer while this was going on.

Finally, a bit of a comeuppance for all the terror he had brought upon me.

Schadenfreude, it's human nature.

Tennis anyone?

Jerry and I went to Pacific Taco #1 for supper tonight. We're on vacation and aren't cooking. The restaurant usually has some South-of-the-Border music playing on the juke box. But tonight there was no music. Just schmoozing between regular customers and the people behind the counter.

The TV was on, but without sound. It was tuned to ESPN and was showing a match from the US Open tennis tournament.

Tennis was the only sport I ever willingly participated in. I was introduced to it through my best friend through my junior high school days (I seem to have changed friends each time I changed schools).

I took lessons in the summer-activities-in-the-park program. One lesson that stuck in my mind was How to Deliver a Killer Serve. The instructor told us to hold our rackets just so, toss the ball into the air, and swing the racket through the ball with a motion we would use as if we were hurling the racket at our opponent. My friend, Kenny, mastered that serve. It would put an incredible amount of spin on the ball so after it curved into the ground it would take off in a strange direction, as if it hit a little wall on the court.

Most of us couldn't quite get the hang of the serve. Some even messed it up so badly that they managed to hurl their rackets at their opponents.

At the end of the six weeks of lessons, we'd have a tournament. The entry fee was a can of new balls. You were out of the tournament after you lost your first match. The loser of each match would get the balls that were used in the match. In one tournament I got to start out against one of the best players in the program. I went home after that first match with the can of balls. I'm sure I lost 6-0, 6-0.

I even participated in the junior high school's tennis program. It was an after school activity where we just played games against others in the program. We didn't play against other schools. It was for fun with little, if any, competition.

I think I kept this tennis thing up for about three years. Each year would start out with a nasty blister on my thumb where it rubbed against the racket. It took a few weeks to figure out how to grip the racket at the start of each year.

Tennis was a good sport for me. I was good enough at it to have fun. And I was on my own. I'm not a team player. Probably because I was always among the last to be chosen for teams in gym class.

(I don't think that any of my family ever watched me play in my few competitions. But I'm not complaining, mind you, just observing.)

I even followed professional tennis. When I lived in Los Angeles in the mid-'70s while working in the B-1 Division of Rockwell International ("Where Science gets down to Business"), I went to The Strings' World TeamTennis games at the Fabulous Forum. (I'm stunned to find out that WTT is still in business.) I'd even know who was playing at Wimbledon.

But I don't follow it or any other sport now. I didn't recognize the names of either of the players tonight. The closest I've gotten to tennis in a long time were the occasional emails I'd get offering me hot pix of Anna Kournikova. I had no idea who they were talking about. (Roger Federer, on the other hand...)

I guess I'm over tennis.

Good Friends

Mom has always been a Reduce, Reuse, Recycle person. When we were kids, she reused a plastic can with a perforated top. It's label had peeled off probably from having been washed before being reused. It was refilled with some scouring powder. Was it bought in bulk, further reducing waste?

Peggy made sure we knew what was in the can. On its side she wrote something like:

Bon Ami

French "good friend"

from Latin "bonus amicus"

That little bit of etymology introduced me to the notion that words aren't simply sounds that have had some sort a meaning assigned to them but rather have rich histories and meanings built right into them.

But not everybody has figured that out. Every day at work I hear people using words that pretty much sound like the words that they want to use. I know what they're saying but it bugs me that these highly educated people are just making sounds and not employing words that are full of meaning.

Some examples:

• When someone isn't making progress he tries a different tact.
• When something is irrelevant, it has become a mute point.
• When a skeleton of an idea needs more substance, its details get flushed out.

I grimace each time I hear those (and I hear them a lot) but I keep my mouth shut. That last one gets to me the most. I never hear anybody use the word they really want.

I'm sure somewhere in this post I have committed my own sin. But that's OK. You know what I meant.

Another trip to Springer

I'm off to reform school again.

I don't know what prompted this one or when it happened.

Jack is clearly making a joke here. But Jack, the kid you were kidding never knew you to make a joke and was too young and naive to figure it out. The kid knew that you (probably) couldn't just ship people off to reform school. But things like this made it very clear that you didn't want him around.

But if I had been locked up in Springer, who would have passed the tools to you when you were under a car changing the oil or replacing the U-joints?

Curb your enthusiasm

"I have an analytical mind" the scientist father would say while sagely tapping his temple with his index finger. He'd say this with a tone that conveyed the rest of his thought: "you idiot child!" This would be in response to such things as his son's putting the wrong sized nut on a bolt and asking for help undoing it or accidentally knocking a "precision instrument" off the table.

One thing that bewilders me about this analytical mind is that it never lifted a sage finger to try to pass on the love of discovering the unknown. He never was involved in my education where I loved science. He never tried to encourage that interest.

In the second grade we had an assignment to do an experiment for our science fair. The best experiments of each class were entered in the school's fair. We had a book of experiments to give us ideas. I chose one that demonstrates that salt water is more buoyant than fresh water. My exhibit showed that a pencil weighted with a thumb tack in its eraser (to keep it from simply floating on its side) floats higher in a glass of salty water than in unsalted water. My entry didn't make it out of the classroom.

That was my only entry in a science fair. I've never been good at finding problems to solve. (I am very good at solving problems that thinkers come up with.) I wonder how things might be different if my father had been involved by challenging me analyze things better. Or to come up with questions that need to be answered then trying to answer them.

I guess he felt that teaching kids the the arts and sciences was the work of school teachers. At home kids are to learn such useful skills as how to fetch a 5/8"—11/16" box-end wrench from a horribly unorganized toolbox in less than two seconds.

Even when I misunderstood something in his area of expertise, chemistry, he wouldn't take time to teach anything about the subject. One morning while eating my Malt-O-Meal, I mentioned that when I add the sugar to it, it seems to get a little more watery than it was before. In school we had recently learned that when carbohydrates burn they turn into water and carbon dioxide. I speculated that maybe there was a chemical reaction going on where the sugar, a carbohydrate, is turning into CO₂ and H₂O and the newly formed water was staying in the cereal. He replied, in his analytical mind tone, if that were so that I could achieve the same result by just tossing in a lump of coal.

First, Mr. Scientist, my speculated reaction doesn't work with elemental carbon. It needs the hydrogen. And, besides, why not take the opportunity to do something useful like explain osmosis? Scientist, indeed! Analytical mind, bah!

OK, maybe he did occasionally encourage scientific investigation. He gave me the Edmund Scientific catalog. But he didn't often help me choose stuff or help me learn things from the stuff I got.

Music, it turns out, became a very important part of my life.

In the fourth grade I took up the violin. In the fifth grade I was going to try out the deeper, richer sounding cello. Here, my father was much more supportive than with the sciences. He encouraged my musical education with the little contract added to the bottom of this form:

Springer is where the New Mexico Boys’ School, a detention center for male juveniles, was at the time. I was threatened with being sent to Springer for things as minor as looking at him with crossed eyes. Since my father never exhibited a sense of humor, these threats must have been real.

By the time I got enrolled in the music program they had run out of cellos. I took a stab at the violin for another year. I'm sure I didn't practice daily but my contract became null and void when they ran out of cellos. No reform school because of a technicality!

Of course my father's taste in music didn't include what comes out of a cello or violin. His taste was that served up by K-Circle-B in Albuquerque. That was middle-of-the-road popular and country music. So he never really encouraged my musical education. (He probably discouraged it...the screechiness probably hurt his ears tremendously.)

I wonder how my life would have been different if I had gotten some encouragement in my attempts at learning music.

But if things had been different, I wouldn't be who I am now. I'm pretty happy with how I turned out.

Still, a little enthusiastic encouragement can go a long way. (I might have even had some happier memories to share.)

Confusion in the First Grade

I started the first grade badly.

Either nobody told me which classroom was mine or I simply forgot. When the bell rang I went into the wrong room. The teacher called roll and I said "here" when my name was called. It turned out that some kid who was supposed to be in that class had moved away over the summer and apparently nobody told the school. The kid's name was "Charles" or something that sounded like to to me.

Since everybody was accounted for, the teacher started into our first lesson. (I think that this was the legendary Mrs. Bernard (or was she a second grade teacher?).) After some time somebody stuck her head into the classroom to see if I happened to have been misplaced. I had. I was taken next door to Miss Welty's classroom.

I guess I was so traumatized by that first day that I don't really remember much about that year of school. Except for the butter.

One day we got to churn butter. With our own little hands. We all took turns turning the crank on the churn. After a while we had a lump of butter. Real butter. Miss Welty had also made a loaf of bread. I seem to remember that it was somehow baked right there in the classroom. We each got a slice of fresh bread and handmade butter!

I wouldn't touch it.

I was under the impression that Mom didn't like butter. If Mom didn't like butter then Charley didn't like butter! Charley doesn't eat what Charley doesn't like. He won't even give it a taste!

Miss Welty tried and tried to get me to give it a try. I'd have none of it. She persevered. I finally acquiesced. I touched the tip of my tongue to the butter and said "There! I've tried it!" And that was the last time I ate real butter for a long time.

Years later I learned that Mom didn't like store bought butter. That it was nothing like glorious, home churned butter. (I still don't understand how margarine was supposed to be a better substitute for hand churned butter than store bought butter.)

That was my first and last encounter with hand churned butter. I blew it.

Actually, Mrs. Mundinger probably was my teacher then.

First, kindergarten started with Mrs. Thomas and ended with Mrs. O'Flaherty. Then first grade started with Miss Welty and ended with Mrs. Mundinger. Does this happen each year? Life is so confusing!

But this time pregnancy wasn't involved (I guess). Miss Welty got married early in the school year and became Mrs. Mundinger.

I apparently was in love with Mrs. Mundinger. My souvenirs box has more memories of her than of any other teacher.

I have her school picture:

Mrs. Mundinger

The newspaper account of her wedding:

Her Valentine to me:

I need to get some cream and churn me some butter!

It turns out I wasn't responsible for my kindergarten teacher's pregnancy!

I had two kindergarten teachers. The first one went on maternity leave in the middle of the year, right after Christmas.

I don't know where the idea came from but I or several of the kids decided that it was our fault that she was going to have a baby. We had all given her candy as Christmas presents. You know, women who eat lots of candy get fat and women who are going to have a baby get fat. Logically, the only conclusion was that our candy caused her pregnancy.

My mid-year report to parents was prepared Jan. 6, 1961, by pregnant Mrs. Thomas. The introduction to the report explains that "a child's first year in school is probably as important a year of educational experience as he will ever have. The forming of good work habits or the lack of them will influence his entire life both in and out of school." That appears to be true.

I got the hoped for Generally or Not Yet check marks for most of the items in the report. The Sometimes items seem to have predicted the rest of my life rather accurately.

Under the Mental Growth's Oral Expression section I got Sometimes for:

• Does he express himself freely?
• Does he ask pertinent questions?
• Does he share his experiences vocally?

Nope, I still can't function vocally very well, especially with people I don't know. Small talk with strangers? Can't do it.

In Mentally Mature as indicated by the way he listens to stories, poems, songs, and group conversation I got Sometimes for Does he retell short stories. I can't remember stories very well. I can't remember the story of a movie unless I've seen it at least two times. Novels? Forget it. I can't remember two pages back in a book and can't keep the characters sorted out. (Oh, I'm very different from my sisters!)

Emotional and Social Growth: Sometimes ratings for:

• Is he self-confident?
• Does he have a healthful attitude toward group approval? (I don't know what that means.)
• Is he too submissive?
• Does he take the initiative in social situations?

Mrs. Thomas had me figured out from the beginning.

My year-end assessment by my second teacher, Mrs. O'Flaherty, told mostly the same story. I got a flat-out Not Yet for Has Leadership Qualities. That still hasn't shown up.

It looks like it's true that All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten. Or, really, if I haven't learned it in kindergarten it's never really going to catch on.

Letting the days go by

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack

And you may find yourself in another part of the world

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife

And you may ask yourself — Well...how did I get here?

— "Once in a Lifetime" by David Byrne

Well, how did I get here?

When I started this little blog, I showed how we use some of our gadgets. I've been running out of gadgets to show off.

I've used it to tell what fun things happen to us. Lately it's been: Work, Eat, Sleep. Repeat.

I've shown pictures of goings on in the yard. Once is usually enough. If you want to see what this spring brought us (or what next spring will bring) you might as well look at what I showed you last spring.

I make some random observations of things that strike me as bizarre. I hope more bizarre things happen now and then. They're fun to share.

I've shown pictures of our turtles. This will continue forever. We'll never reach the end of them. I just scheduled the Tuesday posts into October. But that's about all I've been posting for a few weeks.

I've been letting the days go by with nothing from me.

The second largest collection of posts is my memories. This might be where I'll take this blog now.

I think that I'll dig into my souvenirs boxes and try to explain more about how I got here. I'm sure I will often be complaining about some of the less-than-happy events in my childhood.

I'm not sure what the point of that really is. Maybe it's to give parents who read this blog advice on what not to do. (But my only regular readers are friends and family who don't need parenting advice from me.) Or maybe it's to tell parents that they don't need to obsess over being perfect parents, that kids can turn out to be fine citizens even with some not-so-great parenting.

But there are some happy memories in these boxes. I'll restart this blog with one of them.

The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory had a few open houses where they let people into the lab to give us a glimpse of what goes on inside those secure walls.

They had one of them on the 15th anniversary of the Trinity Test. I was five. I got to match wits with a computer! I got a printout that shows how I did.

The computer could count 1,700 times faster than I could. I must have been counting very fast since its claim about how many additions it could do during my life had it doing about 42,000 additions every second (they said it did a million additions per day).

I guess this experience played a role in bringing me where I am today.

They had another open house five years later. We got to look inside a reactor from a door in its top. It had a beautiful glow coming from deep in the water. Nuclear power was scary but beautiful! I was looking forward to seeing that again in five years when they would have another open house but they didn't do it again.

Ah! Those were happy times for a future nerd.

The Epic Journey of Apollo 11

Everybody, it seems, is remembering Apollo 11 today. It is the 40th anniversary of its landing on the Moon, after all.

My reminiscences come, of course, in the form of photographs.

Back in 1969 there weren't a lot of homes with video tape recorders to capture television programs. In the days leading to the landing, the news programs suggested that we could use cameras to take pictures of our television sets to keep a record of the event. All we had to do is put a camera on a tripod and set the shutter speed to 1/30th of a second. That's the refresh rate of the NTSC broadcast standard used in the U.S. at the time. We needed to carefully focus on the TV screen and set the aperture to let in enough light for the speed of the film we were using. They told us what apertures to use for the different speeds of film.

Our pictures of the event were on two rolls of film. The pictures leading up to the landing are color slides and the pictures of the extravehicular activity are black and white prints. Mom or Dad sent me the prints. I don't have the negatives.

The aperture for the color slides seems to have been set as if the faster, black and white film was in the camera. Those pictures are terribly underexposed and sometimes it is hard to see what's in the pictures.

The pictures of the EVA are not that great because the quality of what was on the TV screen was not that great.

I wasn't the nerdiest nerd on the block. After they went back into the Lunar Module I figured there wasn't a lot to see so I went to bed. It was well past my usual bedtime.

I wish I had a better memory. About the only thing I remember is Nixon's phone call to the astronauts. I was kind of annoyed that they had to pause to chit chat with him. They had more important things to get done.

I was also annoyed that Armstrong's descent down the ladder and his small step onto the moon were so dark and fuzzy. I wondered if they can send a man to the moon, why can't they make a camera that can show what's happening? They explained the technical issues of the difficulties with sending back live video from the moon and I guess that satisfied me. Still....

I'm glad I got to witness this. I'm not convinced that there is a need to go back yet. Low Earth orbit offers a lot of opportunities for valuable science to be done and is fairly accessible. But then, I'm not a rocket scientist so what do I know?

Here are the pictures we took of Apollo 11.

The Epic Journey of Apollo 11

The captions of the EVA pictures were written by Mom on the backs of the pictures.

Ai, Chihuahua!

In January, 1971, the family (minus Poss, who had gotten far too many demerits to deserve the opportunity to join us) took to the road and visited the capital of the Mexican state of Chihuahua. I told a story of this trip earlier.

Here are the pictures from that trip.

I am completely bummed because there are no pictures of Pancho Villa's widow nor his death car. I was looking forward to seeing our photos of them.

The things we get to see are:

• Outside Pancho Villa's house
• An aqueduct (featured on the state's Coat of Arms)
• Murals by Aarón Piña Mora in the Government Palace of Chihuahua
• A statue of Pancho Villa
• The Mines of Santa Eulalia (this Harper's article by Lew Wallace makes it sound like this is a place we wanted to see)
• Scenery around the city

Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico

Here is a better picture of the execution of Hidalgo.

Anybody know anything about the unidentified scenery around town?

Childhood fears

I haven't worn cuffed pants since I was a kid. Dirt would collect in the cuffs and I didn't like that. When I'm shopping for pants I simply cannot try on pants with cuffs because I know that they will fill themselves with sand.

I quit eating my pancakes with syrup when I was young. I would always get syrup on the fork's handle and my hands would get sticky. I hated sticky hands. For many years I would use just butter on pancakes and waffles. I use syrup again. My fork and fingers occasionally get sticky but I just get up and rinse them off now. (Jerry makes the best pancakes!)

I was always sure that aliens were outside the house at night, hovering above the ground, looking into the house though the windows that didn't have curtains. One night I woke up and there there was a strange hum filling the room. It could only be an alien spacecraft hovering outside the room! But it turned out that I had fallen asleep with an old shortwave radio turned on and the turner had drifted off into a staticky spot. I still have weird feelings when I make a (still infrequent) nighttime trip to the bathroom. It takes a lot of effort to look out the window. I still have the feeling that a Martian will be there watching me. (Martians are perverts.)