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Post by clarencebunsen on Oct 11, 2008 5:33:00 GMT -5
What Dave said.
Clipper, you have a unique combination of strength and compassion. May they be enough to carry you through the dark times.
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Post by golden on Oct 13, 2008 22:20:07 GMT -5
Clipper, My prayers and thougts are with you and your Dad.
I hate to be the bearer of more bad news but now soda prices will be going up also 11/1/08! So much for the price of gas going down everything else is still going up! It is sad to see all of this, working in retail PT I am seeing how broke people are. Tonight I had people payng for their beer with pennies!! It is sad!
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Post by Clipper on Oct 13, 2008 23:03:22 GMT -5
Thank you all for the good thoughts and prayers. Clarence, I am not unique in any sense of the word. I am a lucky man. I have seen the darkest days and the depths of despair as an active alcoholic. While it was the darkest days of my life, it brought me to places I never would have found without the alcohol problem and the ensuing rehab.
The principals of a twelve step program and all the little sayings and slogans give me strength and faith. I live with the premise that if God brings me to it, he will also bring me through it. I also like the fact that the task ahead of us is never greater than the power behind us.
My dad brought me up to care about people. My dad stuck with me when I was not a very nice person, and had faith that someday I would turn my life around. For that I am grateful. Nobody was prouder than my dad when I got sober, and remained that way. He has always been my rock, and now I am his. It is my pleasure to dedicate my days to making his last days on this earth as pleasant as possible. My dad is my hero. If I lived to be one hundred, I could never repay the love and guidance that I have received from that man.
Once again, thank you everyone for all the thoughts and for the flattering words. I do nothing special, and hope that any one of you would or will do the same thing for your own mom and dad. We OWE them big time, and we have too little time to pay them back.
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Post by Ralph on Oct 14, 2008 1:29:49 GMT -5
Too quick some forget the contributions that parents make to ones life. While you think that what you are doing is nothing special.....these days it is. It is never easy to let them go, but there are other worlds than this. This life is but a journey to the next.
We'll keep him and the rest of your family in our thoughts and prayers Clipper. You need anything, feel free to give me a call.
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Post by Clipper on Oct 14, 2008 5:43:29 GMT -5
Thanks to everyone! It warms my heart to know that we are all like family, and that we have a lot of extra moral support in our friends here on the forum Golden, it is getting serious now!! I don't care how much beer costs, but when they mess with my soda prices and infringe on my diet pepsi prices and bottled water prices, I can get very nasty, haha.
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Post by clarencebunsen on Oct 14, 2008 8:03:48 GMT -5
Clipper,
A combination of the warp and woof of this thread: rising prices and remembrances of our fathers.
Although my father was always securely employed, raising a large family sometimes made for a strained budget. One summer he revived a depression era recipe for root beer. He got a bottle capper, we kids collected a supply of empty bottles and proceeded to make a batch.
As I recall it was simple enough. Mix the ingredients, pour into bottles, add a pinch of yeast and cap. The bottles were then placed on their sides in the attic while the yeast did it's magic.
It was a somewhat limited success. I don't know if the problem was wrong yeast, wrong temperature or some defect in our technique but roughly 1/2 the bottles exploded before the end of the brewing period.
I currently have 5 gallons of wine fermenting in the basement, much less hazardous.
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Post by Clipper on Oct 14, 2008 9:04:21 GMT -5
I remember my grandfather trying to make home brew beer that same way. He put the bottles in the fruit cellar and they did the same thing. It was a foamy smelly mess down there, and the yeast smell never went completely away, until the fall when they purchased their onions and apples for the winter, which covered the smell, haha
I am sure that this will be a topic of great reminiscing, so I will ramble in my usual manner. Stand by for a long tale of my grandpa's adventures and my reminiscences, haha.
When my grandfather died, my dad inherited a small wine barrel that I would estimate to be about 3 or 4 gallons in size. It was filled with concord grape wine from gramp's own grape arbor in the back yard. It was so old it had gotten thick, almost syrupy in consistency, and dark like Mogan David's concord wine. I was too young to drink it, but was given a few sips of my dad's. It was very sweet and VERY strong. Dad has talked about that old barrel of wine several times over the years and how it was just an accident that it was almost brandy, and had not turned to vinegar. Of course we know nothing of wine making, or what is a factor in whether wine becomes vinegar or brandy. My grandfather always made dandelion wine and elderberry wine also. He was not a big drinker, and gave most of it away in glass gallon jugs and quart bottles. I think he just enjoyed making it, and the joy of giving it to friends and relatives.
My grandfather was a fun person to be around, and he was always tinkering with something. He once was bored so he started building worm boxes and raising nightcrawlers. Pretty soon, he had a cellar full of worm boxes and was selling worms wholesale as well as to local fishermen. That evolved into Al's Bait shop on Main Street in Whitesboro. He also fabricated brass rods a couple of feet long, wired directly to a 110 outlet, that made the worms come out of the ground even in the day time. The only problem was if you reached for a worm that was in close proximity to the place the rod was stuck in the ground, the electricity would knock you on your ass, haha.
He had a wonderful and fully equipped woodshop in one of his two garages. He built me many many wooden toys when I was little, and we always had a huge box of building blocks that he had lovingly cut and sanded smooth by hand. He also built toyboxes, kid sized tables and chairs, and kid's picnic tables. I was lucky to be the oldest grandson, and my father's oldest son, and I inherited my gramp's tool chest and his antique planes, saws, wooden clamps and such. I also have a fully equipped shop and tinker with wood. The addiction to the smell of fresh sawdust must be a family weakness, haha.
I have never ventured into the home brewing business though. I would think it would be great fun to make your own root beer, or birch beer. I would most likely do my brewing and processing in a concrete blockhouse away from the main residence. I am dangerous with yeast and stuff. I once blew up a "herman cake" in my fridge when I was single. I opened the door after work one day to get a soda, and the entire inside of the fridge was covered with oozing dripping herman cake batter where the damn thing blew the cover off the container I had it in.
As for rising costs, I guess we are saddled with a lifetime of it. Gas is down a little right now, but they say it is a product of the economy and because people are simply not traveling because of the unstable markets and unstable financial situation. When demand decreases, prices come down in order to stimulate buying.
I am afraid soda prices are the least of our worries. I took a licking for $350 in a month on a 401K that I have. I am only 62, so I hope to recover that before I am 70 and start drawing it off. I don't figure I have lost anything, as I made max contributions to have them matched by my employer at the time. So far I am "losing" THEIR money, if you look at it like that. I am actually losing NOTHING unless I get nervous and withdraw some or all of it. Then I would pay the penalties and the taxes and then I would lose money.
Consumer good costs have risen in leaps and bounds over the last few years. I cannot believe that a gallon of milk is close to $5 in some places here in the south, and the farmer still is the only one not making his fair share of the price. I can't believe that ground meat that used to be a buck or so, is now close to $3 a pound and filled with water and fat. When I first moved here, I was buying fresh extra large eggs from a local farmer for a buck a dozen. Now he has quit raising chickens due to the cost of feed, and I pay $2.60 in the store. You can buy "medium" eggs for a buck and a quarter, but what they call "medium" is about the size of a pigeon egg. LOL.
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Post by clarencebunsen on Oct 14, 2008 11:17:05 GMT -5
Clipper, Your ramblings brought up a number of memories for me.
Back when Ike was president rather than a hurricane, my parents were partners with my aunt & uncle in a bait shop. The bait shop was also a 2 family: my aunt & uncle lived behind the shop & my family lived above it. No basement, so the worms were raised in a a large bed out back.
My uncle was always scouting for additional organic material for the worm bed and one day a truckload of surplus onions was delivered. An inch or so of soil was removed, the onions were spread out and the soil replaced.
In a couple weeks, digging for worms became a much less desirable task. Your grandfather's device would have been a welcome addition. Since my father was an electrical engineer and my uncle a jack of many trades (including cable splicing), I'm sure this would have been a trivial task for them.
However since my father had a day job as an engineer & a night job as a machinist (my parents were saving for a down payment for a house), my uncle had a day job, my mother & aunt ran the bait shop; the task of digging worms fell to the kids. Saving labor in that area was not a low priority, it was a no priority.
I never did learn if onion flavored worms attracted or repelled fish.
My uncle did demonstrate one labor saving technique for the bait shop. Near the worm bed was a minnow pond which needed to stocked periodically. He and I were hiking a stream for likely pools to seine minnows. He tested pools by firing a gun into them and judging by the number and type of minnows that floated up whether we should invest any time in them.
Also out back was a chicken coop. Even fresher and cheaper than a farmers market. However from personal experience I can offer this advice. If your mother sends you to the coop to collect eggs and there are more than you can carry in one trip, do NOT put the excess in your jacket pocket.
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Post by Clipper on Oct 14, 2008 12:15:26 GMT -5
LOL! I assume that the voyage from henhouse to kitchen was rougher than the henfruit could withstand.
Where was that baitshop? I used to buy bait from a couple over off the arterial. I can't remember the street, but you got off the arterial at Oswego street and turned left. It was on a side street from Lenox ave, near the entrance to the Scheidleman's warehouse truck entrance. You had to ring a bell at the back door and they would bring your bait. I don't know where they kept it. I almost remember that it may have been on Ash street. You could ring that bell at 5 AM and they would answer the door with a smile. Nice folks.
I don't know if chickens are allowed in that neighborhood, unless you cage them and call them domesticated ghetto pheasants. that is what a friend of mine living in Albany told the cops when they told him he could not raise racing pigeons in the city. He called them ghetto pheasants and said they were pets. He was ulitmately unsuccessful and had to give away the birds. haha.
I used to set minnow traps in the oriskany and sauquoit creeks and ride my bike to gather the minnows. My grandfather fabricated a small pump that would run off the wheel driven generator on the bicycle, and would aerate the minnow bucket strapped to the carrier on the back of the bike, much like the bubbler in a fish tank. It was wired into the generator instead to the headlight. I never rode at night anyhow. that was a short lived venture, and then he started buying a much more reliable source of minnows from a wholesaler. Us kids then made our spending money picking night crawlers at twin ponds, and sadequada golf courses at night, and catching crawfish for bass bait. We also had a short piece of garden hose hidden in the woods behind Mt Olivet Cemetery. In dry times we would sneak in after dark, hook our hose to the faucets made for watering flowers, and water a good sized piece of the grass around it. We then would come back a couple hours later and pick night crawlers. We did that a couple times in the lithuanian cemetery also. I loved going to my grandparents for the weekend because I could make some money selling worms and crabs to my grandpa. The last time I visited my gramps grave in Mt Olivet, I noticed that the faucets are more like bathroom spigots now, and you can't screw a hose onto them, Hmmmm. I wonder if we precipitated that change way back in the early 60's haha. Caretakers had to have noticed wet stones and wet grass when it hadn't rained in weeks, haha.
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Post by clarencebunsen on Oct 14, 2008 16:56:46 GMT -5
The baitshop was in NW Indiana. There was only one neighbor within walking distance and from our backyard to the RR tracks there was nothing but a half mile of vacant land. Thus there were no complaints about either the chickens or the occasional smell from the worm bed.
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Post by Clipper on Oct 14, 2008 17:11:53 GMT -5
Oh hell. I guess it was not the same one. I don't think Indiana is near Ash St is it? Hey what the hell. Onion flavored worms should do well for fish that crave a little savory seasoning on their worms. When I fished with the military bass anglers association when I worked at Griffiss there were bass bait sprays that had garlic in them, and many also contained anise oil.
I am surprised though that the chickens didn't scratch in the worm beds and get into the onion compost. Heck all you would have to do is dice some green peppers and throw them in with the onion flavored eggs, and you were on your way to a shortcut western egg.
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