Archive for October, 2006
In addition to pursuing the usual outdoor adventures this summer, I decided in June that I would like to re-landscape the hill in front of our house. The previous owners (bless their hearts) had taken out all the trees on the hill and replaced them with a hodgepodge of juniper bushes. The bushes would have been nice, except they were too far apart to adequately cover the ground, causing the landscape fabric to deteriorate and weeds and grass to invade. When we bought the house nearly two years ago, the hill had grown quite out of hand. This spring, I decided to get started on renovation.
In the five intervening months I've pulled out an estimated sixty juniper bushes (each at least ten feet across), run about twenty pickup loads to the dump, and successfully used up a good share of my weekend hours hacking away at the prickly branches and rope-like roots of these amazing plants. My method for removal evolved from a rudimentary phase (hacking each branch off individually, then digging out the root system) to slightly more advanced techniques (digging under the root and using a lever to remove the entire bush). Still, each bush took about thirty minutes to an hour, depending on size. At one point I finally caved in and rented an excavator, which compressed about two months of manual labor into two hours....
Continue Reading October 23rd, 2006
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This last weekend I drove down to Portland for my ten year high school reunion. About a hundred people attended from a graduation class of around 350. Not surprisingly, I didn't know about a third of the people who attended. The night before the reunion, Josh pulled out our yearbook and we attempted a last minute cram session to refresh our memories on names and faces. Most of the people looked familiar, but the only ones who hold any meaning now are those with whom I can remember a shared memory: a class taken, activities done together.
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The day of the reunion, Adam, Josh and I drove down to the high school and had the good fortune of finding the school open for a regional debate tournament. We roamed the hallways, sneaking into rooms that held memories of classes and teachers we remembered. In the band room, we noticed that the plaque with Adam's name on it had fallen off the wall. After digging around a bit, we found it lying on top of a cabinet. It felt like we had unearthed an archeological artifact. Adam left a note on the whiteboard (it would have been a blackboard in our day) to petition the teacher to reinstate his memorial.
The organizer of the reunion had orchestrated a couple of prizes for such things as who had traveled farthest to attend the reunion (a couple from British Columbia, though I'm positive my friend Adam from Utah should have received that one). I won the prize for the person with the most actual or prospective children (two born, one on the way). Embarassingly, the reward for such productivity was a box of contraceptives, presumably a suggestion that enough is enough!
See all the photos from the reunion by clicking here.
October 15th, 2006
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When we lived in Kansas, I did quite a bit of research on my great grandfather's family history. His parents (German colonists from what is now the Ukraine / Moldova area) settled in east central Kansas and I was able to visit the places they worked and lived, as well as their gravesites. I have only one remaining relative in Kansas that I know of: Jerry Rittel, owner of Rittel's Western Wear in Abilene. I met him in the autumn of 2002 on my first trip to Marion and the surrounding towns.
The Rittel family story (what little is known, anyway) is quite fascinating; I only wish I had more details of how the family came to America and what their life in the old Russian Empire was like. The story of the German colonization of the Black Sea area has been well documented (see this site for a good general description), but I wish my family had been more interested in preserving their family stories. I get the feeling that my great grandfather didn't want to have much to do with the culture of his immigrant parents, preferring the anonymity of American individualism to his parent's traditional ways....
Continue Reading October 1st, 2006
