Saint Paddy's Day

Deb and I (and Giff, our self proclaimed clueless boss) met on this date in 1981.  36 years ago.

We (not Giff) actually remember the date more fondly than our wedding day.  I already told you what went wrong there.  Oh, how I wanted a wedding like my sister's.  Upstairs in the chapel, do the ceremony.  One flight down was the big common room where the ladies of the church cooked and served the meal.  The choir director played piano the whole time, not hymns, but there wasn't enough beat to dance.  It was nicely decorated.  I bet the arrangements were easy as pie.

Our wedding involved a cast of thousands and my opinions were wanted on every score.  Until she realized that I didn't have a preference for flowers, favors, match boxes, the venue, the food, the photographer, the invitations, etc, etc.  I had some interest in the band (Bruno's on the Boulevard had standards that required live music) but it's not like the Dead or Bruce Springsteen were available.  Picking from the local talent was a formality, with a limited number to choose from.  Deb and her mother, Shirley, did all the leg work.  I think it was a task they thoroughly enjoyed.  It was hectic and stressful.  And ended in a welfare hotel.  Dr Mitzi thought it was a hooker hotel, but never mentioned it until a couple of weeks ago.

We spent a week in southern New Hampshire and then two weeks redoing our kitchen.  OMG, she was a good sport.  She had no training in the use of tools.  I had to learn how to ask for something.  Screwdriver?  I had to do an air-screwdriver move with my hand and wrist when I asked for a screwdriver.  Same with hammer.  We'd never worked together on a carpentry project before and we both got frustrated with each other on occasion.

What was good is we shared the same vision.  We wanted a new kitchen in our Junior-4 coop apartment, we couldn't possibly do it on weekends and we each got an extra week from the bank - they had a policy of granting a bonus week when you got married.  We saw the end result as something worth doing and worth 2 of the 3 weeks of our honeymoon.  We carried that throughout our years together.

I'm no longer expecting her in her electric easy boy chair when I come in.  I no longer have to run upstairs because the bathroom on the first floor has a booster on the toilet.  When she first put it in, she wanted to know why I didn't just drop trow and use her bathroom.  I looked at her and said I didn't need that project managed.  I miss that give and take.  Her trying to get in my business and me trying to explain something.  For instance, like how electricity has waves and regular electricity has a plus and minus whereas 3 phase electricity has one minus and 3 pluses.  She always thought if she understood what I was doing, she could help me do it better.  Mainly she wanted her opinion taken seriously.  As long as I tried to explain, she was happy to encourage me to do anything I wanted.  Understandable or not.  I'm sure she handled me just as deftly.

That's who I miss.   It's been about 2 months and I'm getting used to her not being here to impress with my acumen in cooking, log cutting, lawn mowing and handy man jobs.  I have to do it for me now.

It is nice now that if I want something I can call a board of director meeting, decide and move on,  since I'm now the only one on the board. In the last week I have been able to skip the meeting and simply decide on things.  The board meetings with Deb were mostly fact gathering and a little Q/A and then she'd agree with me or me with her.   It was the absolute opposite of a hostile board.  But she did like to know what I was up to, what my golf score was, what was in the Amazon box that just came with a tool in it.  Even from her easy chair, she was running the house.  Ask any one of the women who took care of her.  She pulled her weight vicariously at the end.

On the workshop side, I got a metal bandsaw.  I can do in a minute or so what a hacksaw does in a half hour.  Today I got my Bridgeport mill running.  So the lathe and mill are ready for work.  I spent some time clearing clutter.  Tomorrow I'll return all the tools I used to their places.  Maybe even sweep the floor.  There is a new smell in my workshop.  It is machine oil.  It is very distinctive.  A clean smell, not at all like used motor oil.  I like it.  I'd been smelling it for years here and there and never identified it as Eau de Oil de Machine.

I don't have the skills yet to do complicated machining.  Think wood working except with bars of hard metal.  Think of dealing in thousandths instead of eighths of an inch.  My first project is to thread four 1" steel rods and fasten them as legs to the bottom of a board of cherry I harvested here to be used as a bench to put on and take off your boots at Ryan and Jenny's.

Then I make myself some tools.  I want 2 collet chucks for my 2 lathes.  Middling ones exceed a grand.  I hope to get a few metal slugs for $50 or $100 and turn them into true (straight and perpendicular) running chucks.  I figure I have 10 tries to make one as good or better than the $1000 one.  Especially now that I can buy a longer, less pricy piece and cut it with my new (very old) bandsaw to size.  I expect to do it right the first time.  But if I do, then what did I learn?  I learn well from my mistakes.  Each chuck is a cylinder with a taper at each end, one with english and the other with metric threads.  This is how apprentices filled their tool boxes and learned their trade.

In closing, I reached out to Giff and in his reply, he mentioned I was on his mind, but he didn't want to ask the lame question of "How are you doing?".    I'm doing OK.  Some bad days.  So, don't worrry  if you want to ask how I'm doing to get the conversation going, feel free.

The rest of the European Vacation

I've been up to a lot lately and these stories have dropped a bit in priority.

The rest of the trip went quite smoothly.  We had a nice time visiting Deb's friend Mona and her family north of Zurich.  We got my suit bag strap fixed in Jurg's father's basement where he drilled a strategic hole and put a bolt through and tightened it down.  Worked like a charm.

We spent a couple of days in Switzerland and saw Constance where there was a very intricate topiary.  We were in Liechtenstein for a bit.  Jurg and I didn't know each other, but getting off the train on our first day there, Mona and Deb went from chocolate shop to chocolate shop buying truffles.  Not the kind pigs find, but the chocolate ones.  If I remember right, Jurg and I had time to get to know each other standing outside the shops.  I'd had enough chocolate after the first 3 or 4 shops.

Then to Luxembourg.  Oh it was nice there.  Pretty as a picture, except for all the motorcycles.  You couldn't swing a cat without hitting a biker or the passenger.  They were all over the place.  Thousands of them.  It looked like it was some kind of rally.

After 1 night, back to Brussels and a night in the dorm room of Paul's friend, "the Belgian" who got us to the airport.  Then back to JFK and home again, home again, jiggidy jig.

European Vacation part 2

We're late arriving in Paris and the first order of business is to find a place to stay.  The next night was scheduled to be spent in a sleeper car between Paris and Zurich our next stop.

No problemo, we found a room in a hotel and walked all around.  It was great, Deb and I just wandering around.  The next day was for more serious sightseeing.  Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Champs-Élysées where we had dinner sitting next guy who also was in a technology industry.  We talked and when we had a half hour to take a train that ran every 5 minutes for 5 or 10 minutes, we left toward the Arc de Triomphe for the metro and on to the Gare du Nord (north train station) to collect our luggage from a locker and then to the Gare de l'Est (east train station) to catch our train.

Problemos:

1.  There are 3 or 4 metro lines passing under the Arc de Triomphe and our crappy pronunciation of Gare du Nord was unintelligible to the few who would even stop to answer our question.  Finally we got on the right metro train, fearing we were on the wrong one.

The clock is ticking.  Don't want to miss a second train connection.  We're sleeping on this leg of the trip.

2.  Neither of us thought far enough ahead to use the lockers in the Gare de l'Est.  In those days luggage didn't have wheels.  Cheap luggage didn't last.  Ergo, my suit bag shoulder strap broke.  I was already carrying one bag in each hand.  We were running and bumbling as fast as we could.

3.  This is the big one:  we saw the back of our rolling hotel leaving the station.  Crap.

4.  Now we need to find a room, call Mona and say we're not going to arrive in Zurich at 9am.  Sadly we spent all our francs on dinner, so we needed to change money.    Sadly it was 10:01 and the money changers closed at 10.  So we sought advice and was told a hotel across the street would take our pounds and give us francs, but not travelers cheques.  We walked around the block twice before we found it and he did change our money and didn't have any vacancies.

5.  We got back to the train station at 11:01 to use the international phones to find that they closed at 11.  Kids, there were no cell phones.  Regular pay phones only worked in country.

6.  Now it was time to find a room for the night.  No vacancy was universal.  We spiraled around the train station going further and further and eventually gave up and decided to stay in the train station.  But first, now that we were flush with enough francs that we could call Mona, have a coffee and pastry that evening and the next morning.  So after the race starting on the Champs-Élysées we ended it at a cafe across the street from the train station.

7.  We showed up to find the gates locked.  Why?  They close at midnight.  We were late again and now had nowhere to go.  We walked around looking for something, anything we could do.  Even the phone booths had someone in them.  Deb was considering linking up with some other people our age, but I thought they looked pretty rough.

8.  It starts to rain.

We went back to the guy who changed our pounds and practically begged him to let us sit in his waiting room.  He did so long as we left by 6am.  Deb slept, I read.

At 6 we got into the train station.  At 7 we called Mona.  At 8 we were on the train to Zurich.  Bing, bang, boom.  We've milked that story for 30 some years.  The telling never gets old.

European Vacation, part 1

Deb found tickets from JFK to Brussels for some ridiculously cheap price.  Maybe $200 or $300 round trip.  Going to Europe was never on my list of got to do, but if Deb wanted me with, I was happy to accompany her.

The rub is we hadn't come clean with with our coworkers about our attachment.  But it happened that the department admin and my office mate were also going to Europe.  So Deb went, declaring for Switzerland and France.  I said I was going to London and Germany.  We slipped out the back, Jack.  Nobody had an inkling.  We were careful about relating different stories.  That's about how difficult life was in those days.

Since we were going to land in Brussels, my room mate Paul set us up with his buddy, "The Belgin".  He fetched us from the airport and brought us home.  There we had a nap and had dinner with his family.  I seem to remember separate rooms, due to his parents and our lack of wedding rings.

The next day we took in Brussels and in the evening we were passed to some friends of his and they took us to Bruges, a canal laced city older than dirt.  I think it was old when Columbus sailed.  We had the best dinner of our lives there.  Deb loved their pronunciation of my first name: Rhobean.  The food was a mixed grill of chicken, beef and pork with roasted vegetables all cooked in a fireplace in the main room of the restaurant.  The restaurant held but 5 or 6 tables.  Oh, it was good.  Forever after when we had some particularly good food, we'd compare it to Bruges.

That night was our last with a known destination for 5 days.  I think the Belgin got us on a train to Calais, a ferry to Dover and a train to London.  We lugged our luggage to a road with B&Bs on it and we simply walked down until we found one that said vacancy or to-let or something British.

No reservation.  Dodgy room.  English breakfast.  Nowhere we'd go back to now.  Nevertheless, we had a great time.  2 days later, at the station we were waiting for the train to the ferry and on to Paris, a half hour early.  PIMS is a liquor my grandmother had with our relatives in Toronto and I wanted to bring her a bottle from England.  Yes, Robbin, they sell it in the states and it is probably exactly the same.  Yes, Robbin, we had to carry a bottle through the rest of Europe and safely home.  I'm so much smarter now.

I asked someone where I could get a bottle and it was a short way down the street.  I left Deb with the bags at the end of the train track with the train yet to arrive and ran to the store.  It was further, but they had it.  Watching that I didn't take more than half the time till the train left, I waited behind some 5 year old counting his change.  Everybody thought it was so cute and I was ready to leave the bottle and run back, it was getting close.  You know the end of this story, right?  I arrived to see the last car leaving the station.   A Jamaican train conductor approached us telling us he could easily have held the train a minute.  

Deb's peeved with me, and herself for not letting her NY show.  But we simply had a bar meal and were back a couple of hours later.  No big deal, English pub meals are pretty good and the sun didn't go down until 10 or 10:30, so even late, Paris was just fine.  We found a room and saw Paris in a day. Mona Lisa is like a postage stamp compared to what I had assumed.

Next post will be how we got out of our next bit of trouble.

Robbin's status

Why have I not been writing?  Some days I've got the blues and some days I feel fine.

Lately I've been busy.

2 weeks ago I drove to Annapolis bought a Bridgeport mill and stayed overnight at Deb's friend Susan's apartment.  We had a very pleasant evening.

Last Thursday I had dinner with Deb's work pals.  That was good.  Earlier I had lunch with Joe Del Duca and that was good.

Last Saturday I drove to Boston to stay with my college pals.  On Tuesday I stopped by Great Barrington for a few minutes to check in with Cathy Clark.  Both good.

On Wednesday I had dinner with the New Milford Men's club.  Accidentally I arrived an hour late and missed the majority of the socializing but did meet them and had a nice dinner.

Last night Pat and MaryBeth invited me to dinner, but Pat is suffering from childhood bugs.  They take care of their grand kids.  I didn't want to catch even one bug so I took a rain check.

On eves of each of these activities, I had serious reservations about even going.  Same in the morning.  But... each time I was fine.  Better than fine, I had a good time.  Even the fellow who sold me the mill is a good guy and went over and beyond to help me get it loaded.  It weighs a ton, literally.

I hope this stinking thinking abates.  Its hard.

Tomorrow I'm emptying the trailer (with help) and putting the mill together.  It and my truck have been parked by the  workshop for going on 2 weeks.  

Opposites Attract

Note Before:
The article part is what I wrote last week.  I couldn't get up the oomph to edit.  I did tonight.

It's 2 weeks today that Deb passed away.  The first week and open house are a blur.  The following week, I did this and that, but nothing of consequence.  Today I turned over a 80 pound lathe chuck in a bath of degreaser and counted it as something accomplished.  Getting started at something is the hurdle.  Once I get going, I get it done or at least move it a step in the right direction.  

I'm feeling a hole or vacuum and, simultaneously a peaceful relief.  I haven't sorted out the basis of either.  This widowing stuff is adult stuff, let me tell you.  Wouldn't have handled it well when I was 20.  So far the only thing that's a pain is feeding myself.  I'll solve it.  I'm grazing on the left overs from last Saturday.  

On to the proof that we're opposites, at least in Dr M and Dr B's test.

There's a personality test people in teams sometimes take called Myers Brigs.  It in broad strokes declares how you interact with the world and gives better understanding among teams for how your colleagues act and think in these 4 binary ways.

Here's a clip I took from the MB foundation:

• Favorite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I).
• Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).
• Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called Thinking (T) or Feeling (F).
• Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).

My letters were INTP.  I remember Einstein was an INTP so I am in good company.

Deb's letters were ESFJ.  I can't remember who they cited as part of her club.

Do you see any intersection?  Nope.  

Perhaps we were so successful as a couple and in life because we had, between us, every aspect the Dr Myers and Dr Brigs thought were important personality factors at least how he interpreted them.  This isn't an all or nothing scale, you could be slightly one or the other, but I was strongly in the INTP class and she was strongly in the ESFJ class.  I wonder of the good doctors could have predicted such great success from the two of us when our letters were clearly opposites?  Maybe the test is another kind of BS we bought into as good corporate citizens.

But... I must say that for my team at Roche, it was enlightening and we could interact with each other with new understanding.  Probably the same with Deb's team, although I don't remember their outcomes.  

Conclusion?  Opposites attract. It's gotta be.

Deb's second family

I'm sure the people who knew her as Debbie from the old days remember her relationship with Nick.  He was one of her former beaus.  If I have the story right, she joined his family.  At home, she had a certain rebel role and at Nick's, she was just another member of the family.

At home she attracted her father's ire, her mother warned her about upsetting him too much.  Her brother Peter said it was her fault (a shared joke) but I think the situation was wearing on her.  It's complicated and I don't know if either of us ever figured it all out.

But at Nick's house the food was good, the company was good and she never got in trouble there and they loved her unconditionally.  She learned enough Greek to get by and went to Greece with them.  She always wanted to take me there sometime, but pre-India it sounded HOT.  Now, I regret making a fuss since I adapted to India heat, Greece should have been a breeze.  She has always, always looked fondly at that part of her life.  And she never let go of them.

I found Nick's sister's email and told her last night.  Now we have readers in Greece.

One last Greek story.  I took Deb to Duluth in January in 1984 or 85.  We spent time with my family, but I also drove up the shore of Lake Superior.  She was properly outfitted in a down coat, down mitts, long underwear and good boots (not those thin, stylish things she usually bought).  North of Two Harbors we pulled into a log cabin diner for lunch.  Somehow Deb knew she was in an establishment run by a Greek family and she dropped a few words in Greek and all of a sudden, we were getting truly royal treatment.  Here we sit in the middle of nowhere and she's already made new friends.  And by nowhere, I mean communities of a few hundred people surrounded by state and national forests of 10s or 100s of thousands of acres.  And the Lake Superior, of course.

This day also happened to be a dog sled race day.  We got to walk around and see the dogs that were training for the Iditarod by running this race.  She first made pals with a trailer full of sled dogs and then started talking with the woman who was going to be sledding.  No surprise, right?