A vacation, downtime and a bit of family history
Note: this post has been sitting in the drafts for a long while – not sure why. -mike
With my wife very close to completing her capstone project for her master’s degree, I thought it would be a good time to get out of town and let her have some peace and quiet to finish up. Plus I had a ton of vacation time accrued and my brother was getting ready to move into his first house. I packed up the truck and headed south to Savannah to help him move and paint his new place. On the way I was obligated to get some tasty BBQ.
In between moving and painting I got hooked on a couple TV shows and a video game. He put me on to Squidbillies, an animated show about redneck squids in Georgia as well as the HBO show Eastbound & Down which was created by and stars Danny McBride, a native of FredVegas. It is about as crass as you can imagine and of course I find it hilarious. Plus I like McBride – I think he’s funny as hell. I wish I had shot a better picture of him when he came through town a while back. Oh well… I also spent an inordinate amount of time in Savannah playing a video game called Fallout 3. I have been a fan of Fallout since the original came out for PC something like 10 years ago. I am proud to say (in a geek way) Ned and I had Wasteland – the basis for Fallout – for our Apple IIGS in the late 80′s.
I drove on down to Venice to visit my grandparents for a couple days as I hadn’t seen them in a while. While there, I sat down with my grandfather and recorded an interview with him about growing up on Long Island in the 20′s and 30′s through the end of his service in the Navy in World War II. Next time I’m down I hope to record another interview detailing the post war years as well as my grandmother’s recollections of Long Island, meeting my grandfather and her time working at the Merchant Marine Academy. I’ve been meaning to do this for a couple years after hearing about the Story Corps project. Growing up my brother and I would always press Pop for ‘war stories’ and he would talk about being in the South Pacific on one island or another or on the USS Northampton. In addition to gathering some audio, I copied a bunch of old photos.
Here’s Pop (left) in San Francisco, 1942 with a buddy from the Navy. When I asked who the woman was, he kind of smiled and said, “Va-va-voom!” The inscription said it was taken at a bar called Benny the Bum’s. I found a reference to the bar here that said it was located at 181 O’Farrell St in SF. I guess its a condo now. Anyway, hopefully soon I’ll take some time to edit together some audio and put some pictures up. Here’s Pop outside his Florida home, putting away his flag for the day:
I returned to Savannah to finish helping Ned when he told me he had taken a job at Fort Rucker in Alabama working on helicopters. Sounds like an awesome gig, so congrats to him. I guess it is kind of crappy timing though. Oh well – maybe I can win the lottery, become independently wealthy and buy his house from him. Right. The upside is that I will have an opportunity to travel to Alabama and ideally make some time to head west and explore the Mississippi Delta. Upon my return kelly and I went canoeing on the mighty Rappahannock River with some friends from work. It was a lot of fun as it was a beautiful day and the river wasn’t too hairy nor too low. Seven hours on the water is a long time though. maybe next time we’ll go for a shorter trip…
On a technical note, most of those pics were taken with my iPhone aside from the copy shot of Pop. And I used the TiltShift app on this last pic. I’m having fun playing around with the camera function on that phone… a definite time sink!
I went back to the grind and as always, my first assignment back made me want to go back on vacation! I won’t subject you to the actual image but here’s the assignment: “Pontiac is going under. Localize!” So there you have it.
