I have reached a sort of pinnacle in my professional career. I am a lackey. I've come full circle. Most of the jobs I had before I was 18 were in the lackey class. I was a pin setter- primarily a lackey. I 'pulled' skeet at a shooting ranger- primarily a lackey.
I went on to more skilled trades, I was 'finish carpenter' at an RV manufacturer in southern California, later a welder and a truck driver.
I retired from driving truck, always knowing I would probably have to work part time to make ends meet. I worked at debt collections, for a full year, after I retired.
Now I am back to being lackey full time. Spouse Betty makes beautiful beaded jewelry. She and I participate in Arts and Crafts shows in a half dozen states.
It requires a booth and displays and lights carried in a trailer which we tow behind our truck camper as we travel from show to show.
I am in charge of heavy lifting, maintenance, logistics when we travel, updating and painting our displays and a multitude of other lackey like tasks.
I like being a lackey more than any other job I've done.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Family Funerals
These past couple of weeks have been family, family. Last week a family reunion and this week my aunt died. She was 82 and well loved, they had a large funeral followed by a family get together...
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Family Reunions
Tommorow is our family reunion. This will be the first one I've know about that has taken place in Northern Erie county, most have been in the gingweeds of Catt and or Chatauqua counties. I have such a varied and spread out extended family I never know what to expect. If I make no more enties in this blog it means things worked out for the worst..
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Lewiston, NY
Betty and I are in Lewiston, NY for the arts and crafts show. Because of a change logistically we could not set our booth up until Saturday, the day of the show, at five AM. It made for a long day.
I slept well Wednesday night and not being able to string two good nights of sleep together in a row, I barely slept Thursday. We started setting up Friday, I with just a couple of hours of poor sleep. It was a long day. Sales were OK though and Betty and I went to 'Tin Pan Alley', a restaurant on Cayuga St. just a block away from our camper, parked in the Rite Aid plaza a few hundred feet from out booth on Center.
I couldn't keep my eyes open and went to sleep at 8PM!!!! Got up at 6AM - 10 hours of sleep!! I know, that was over use of the exclamation point. I stirred several times during the night and it was raining but with little wind.. As I write this around 8 AM the sky is blue with puffy clouds and we hope for a god day.
I slept well Wednesday night and not being able to string two good nights of sleep together in a row, I barely slept Thursday. We started setting up Friday, I with just a couple of hours of poor sleep. It was a long day. Sales were OK though and Betty and I went to 'Tin Pan Alley', a restaurant on Cayuga St. just a block away from our camper, parked in the Rite Aid plaza a few hundred feet from out booth on Center.
I couldn't keep my eyes open and went to sleep at 8PM!!!! Got up at 6AM - 10 hours of sleep!! I know, that was over use of the exclamation point. I stirred several times during the night and it was raining but with little wind.. As I write this around 8 AM the sky is blue with puffy clouds and we hope for a god day.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
MP3 X 2
Terry Stephan
Changing Lanes:MP3
I love electronic gadgets. When I was a kid, my imagination was fueled reading the comic strip, “Dick Tracy”. He had a two-way radio, which looked like a wristwatch. The idea that any radio could be that small was mind-boggling.
I had a radio my uncle gave me when I was twelve, my first major electronic gadget. It was a huge shortwave radio, it was just an all-business microwave oven-sized galvanized metal box containing glass tubes and wires. It had a twelve-inch speaker mounted on top and it must have weighed forty lbs. When you turned it on, you had to wait a few minutes for it to warm up before you could listen.
It gave me my first exposure to foreign broadcasts, commercial transportation communications, and best of all, rock and roll.
I didn’t know how it worked, but the sound was great, it brought me the world.
A few years later when I was 15, my first paychecks went for a stereo “hi-fi”. My stereo would play LP’s, 45’s and the old-fashion breakable 78’s. It looked like a suitcase covered with wood-grained contact paper. The ends of the suitcase contained the speakers, they would swing out on hinges to face forward or, you could lift them off and move them away from the turntable to give the sound, ‘stereo separation’. It even had an automatic record changer. I could stack four albums (my complete collection) on the spindle and listen to the first side of each album, uninterrupted. It was an hour of Bob Dylan, Donovan, Peter Paul & Mary, and Janis Ian. I could flip them over, reload and listen to the second four sides.
I set the stereo up in my bedroom on a flimsy stand. Several times, my basset hound Red knocked it over. Scratches on the vinyl music brought thoughts of my clumsy dog Red back to me, years after his demise.
Through the years, I jumped through the technology hoops; I bought new albums, then portable music in the form of eight track tapes and players, then cassettes. When we arrived at compact disks, I thought we were at the end of the road; technology was complete. CD’s have perfect digital sound; you could listen to them on the road, and they took up little space.
The first cut of the first CD I ever listened to was from an album I knew well, the classic Eagles’ hit, “Hotel California”. I loved the song and the group but I’d never heard all the nuances or all the guitar licks. I was stunned at the sound quality.
Over the years, Emmy Lou and I bought numerous CD’s. We gave them to each other when a present was required and asked for them when people wanted gift ideas. What better gift is there than music?
Now people download their music from the internet. They store hundreds of albums worth of music on their hard drive back-ups, often smaller than the size of a cigarette pack.
Emmy Lou and I again are jumping through hoops, keeping up with technology. We gave each other MP3 players for Christmas.
My MP3 player is just a bit larger than a Zippo lighter. It includes FM radio. I have six audio books downloaded on it from the library, and while I don’t know how it works it brings me the world through podcasts from all over. Best of all, I have all my CD’s on it including lots of rock and roll..
We’ve come a long way since I was a kid, My MP3 player does a thousand times what my shortwave radio did and weighs just ounces.
I still haven’t seen one of those Dick Tracy two-way radio wrist watches..
ChangingLanesTerry@gmail.com or comment on my blog at http://changinglanesterry.blogspot.com/
Changing Lanes:MP3
I love electronic gadgets. When I was a kid, my imagination was fueled reading the comic strip, “Dick Tracy”. He had a two-way radio, which looked like a wristwatch. The idea that any radio could be that small was mind-boggling.
I had a radio my uncle gave me when I was twelve, my first major electronic gadget. It was a huge shortwave radio, it was just an all-business microwave oven-sized galvanized metal box containing glass tubes and wires. It had a twelve-inch speaker mounted on top and it must have weighed forty lbs. When you turned it on, you had to wait a few minutes for it to warm up before you could listen.
It gave me my first exposure to foreign broadcasts, commercial transportation communications, and best of all, rock and roll.
I didn’t know how it worked, but the sound was great, it brought me the world.
A few years later when I was 15, my first paychecks went for a stereo “hi-fi”. My stereo would play LP’s, 45’s and the old-fashion breakable 78’s. It looked like a suitcase covered with wood-grained contact paper. The ends of the suitcase contained the speakers, they would swing out on hinges to face forward or, you could lift them off and move them away from the turntable to give the sound, ‘stereo separation’. It even had an automatic record changer. I could stack four albums (my complete collection) on the spindle and listen to the first side of each album, uninterrupted. It was an hour of Bob Dylan, Donovan, Peter Paul & Mary, and Janis Ian. I could flip them over, reload and listen to the second four sides.
I set the stereo up in my bedroom on a flimsy stand. Several times, my basset hound Red knocked it over. Scratches on the vinyl music brought thoughts of my clumsy dog Red back to me, years after his demise.
Through the years, I jumped through the technology hoops; I bought new albums, then portable music in the form of eight track tapes and players, then cassettes. When we arrived at compact disks, I thought we were at the end of the road; technology was complete. CD’s have perfect digital sound; you could listen to them on the road, and they took up little space.
The first cut of the first CD I ever listened to was from an album I knew well, the classic Eagles’ hit, “Hotel California”. I loved the song and the group but I’d never heard all the nuances or all the guitar licks. I was stunned at the sound quality.
Over the years, Emmy Lou and I bought numerous CD’s. We gave them to each other when a present was required and asked for them when people wanted gift ideas. What better gift is there than music?
Now people download their music from the internet. They store hundreds of albums worth of music on their hard drive back-ups, often smaller than the size of a cigarette pack.
Emmy Lou and I again are jumping through hoops, keeping up with technology. We gave each other MP3 players for Christmas.
My MP3 player is just a bit larger than a Zippo lighter. It includes FM radio. I have six audio books downloaded on it from the library, and while I don’t know how it works it brings me the world through podcasts from all over. Best of all, I have all my CD’s on it including lots of rock and roll..
We’ve come a long way since I was a kid, My MP3 player does a thousand times what my shortwave radio did and weighs just ounces.
I still haven’t seen one of those Dick Tracy two-way radio wrist watches..
ChangingLanesTerry@gmail.com or comment on my blog at http://changinglanesterry.blogspot.com/
Thursday, July 23, 2009
My New Girl..
Terry Stephan
I am seeing another woman. She has long dark hair and hazel eyes. We meet on Mondays, but she wears me out for half the week. She pushes me to perform physical feats that Emmy has never tried to make me do.
This sounds exciting but I’m often reluctant when the weekend is closing and it is time to see the young lady again. I’m as shocked as anyone that I’ve begun this liaison with another woman.
OK, I’ll fess up. The true nature of my Monday meetings with the other woman is almost as shocking as what I’ve tried to make it sound like in the paragraphs above.
The young woman is my trainer. I never thought that after spending most of my life’s work performing physical labor I would have to go to a trainer to get into shape. Had I considered it, I probably would have thought I’d need a male trainer who could push me into doing the things necessary to loose weight and gain better health.
The idea that a man could coerce me into doing something difficult more successfully than a woman could, is one of the silliest misconceptions I’ve found kicking around in my head. Being married, I should know better.
‘Trainer Girl’ is what I call my new health instructor. I use it here to protect her identity as well. The moniker looks politically incorrect and a bit disrespectful when I write it on paper, but I hadn’t thought of it as being discourteous. It’s one of the nicer names I call her early in the week. For a couple of days after our appointed get together on Mondays, the little-used muscles of mine that she has called into service cry out in pain. She is great at her job and I respect her intelligence but I have nothing nice to say about her on those days.
I pat myself on the back. I come up with some extremely inventive and earthy descriptive phrases for Trainer Girl, none of which should appear in a family paper. On Tuesday or Wednesday, if I do strenuous activity like picking up the remote or lifting my arm to raise that drink, there must be a bit of ringing in Trainer Girls ears.
I suppose it would be better to call her something like “Trainer Woman”, in the vein of “Wonder Women”. Maybe ‘The Six Million Dollar Lady’ would sound better. The way she crackles and pops with energy and enthusiasm, I have no doubt that Trainer Girl could start doing crunches today on a bet, and you would have to stop her sometime tomorrow so she wouldn’t hurt herself, or damage her bionic parts.
Trainer Lady has helped a lot. She is knowledgeable concerning nutrition and exercise. When I do things her way, I feel much better. Since I started seeing Wonder Woman Trainer Girl, I have lost weight and gained muscle mass.
She has a sense of humor. Just for fun, she makes me sit on the edge of a rubber exercise ball to do ‘crunches’ (I always thought of them as incomplete sit-ups). She positions me on the ball in such a way that makes my undershorts ride up, giving me a severe wedgy.
Besides receiving the extremely uncomfortable wedgy, my socially unacceptable, fat belly sneaks out from under my tee-shirt each time I lay back to start the next wedgy/crunch. They don’t make tee-shirts long enough to cover my abdomen while it is in training.
When doing certain exercises, Trainer girl often tells me to draw my belly button close into my spine. I get a chuckle out of this. My belly button has spent the last thirty years distancing itself from my spine. I don’t think the two will form a close relationship anytime soon. I’ll keep trying to introduce them.
Wish me luck, or at least a longer tee-shirt.
Comments? Changinglanesterry@gmail.com
Or http://changinglanesterry.blogspot.com/
I am seeing another woman. She has long dark hair and hazel eyes. We meet on Mondays, but she wears me out for half the week. She pushes me to perform physical feats that Emmy has never tried to make me do.
This sounds exciting but I’m often reluctant when the weekend is closing and it is time to see the young lady again. I’m as shocked as anyone that I’ve begun this liaison with another woman.
OK, I’ll fess up. The true nature of my Monday meetings with the other woman is almost as shocking as what I’ve tried to make it sound like in the paragraphs above.
The young woman is my trainer. I never thought that after spending most of my life’s work performing physical labor I would have to go to a trainer to get into shape. Had I considered it, I probably would have thought I’d need a male trainer who could push me into doing the things necessary to loose weight and gain better health.
The idea that a man could coerce me into doing something difficult more successfully than a woman could, is one of the silliest misconceptions I’ve found kicking around in my head. Being married, I should know better.
‘Trainer Girl’ is what I call my new health instructor. I use it here to protect her identity as well. The moniker looks politically incorrect and a bit disrespectful when I write it on paper, but I hadn’t thought of it as being discourteous. It’s one of the nicer names I call her early in the week. For a couple of days after our appointed get together on Mondays, the little-used muscles of mine that she has called into service cry out in pain. She is great at her job and I respect her intelligence but I have nothing nice to say about her on those days.
I pat myself on the back. I come up with some extremely inventive and earthy descriptive phrases for Trainer Girl, none of which should appear in a family paper. On Tuesday or Wednesday, if I do strenuous activity like picking up the remote or lifting my arm to raise that drink, there must be a bit of ringing in Trainer Girls ears.
I suppose it would be better to call her something like “Trainer Woman”, in the vein of “Wonder Women”. Maybe ‘The Six Million Dollar Lady’ would sound better. The way she crackles and pops with energy and enthusiasm, I have no doubt that Trainer Girl could start doing crunches today on a bet, and you would have to stop her sometime tomorrow so she wouldn’t hurt herself, or damage her bionic parts.
Trainer Lady has helped a lot. She is knowledgeable concerning nutrition and exercise. When I do things her way, I feel much better. Since I started seeing Wonder Woman Trainer Girl, I have lost weight and gained muscle mass.
She has a sense of humor. Just for fun, she makes me sit on the edge of a rubber exercise ball to do ‘crunches’ (I always thought of them as incomplete sit-ups). She positions me on the ball in such a way that makes my undershorts ride up, giving me a severe wedgy.
Besides receiving the extremely uncomfortable wedgy, my socially unacceptable, fat belly sneaks out from under my tee-shirt each time I lay back to start the next wedgy/crunch. They don’t make tee-shirts long enough to cover my abdomen while it is in training.
When doing certain exercises, Trainer girl often tells me to draw my belly button close into my spine. I get a chuckle out of this. My belly button has spent the last thirty years distancing itself from my spine. I don’t think the two will form a close relationship anytime soon. I’ll keep trying to introduce them.
Wish me luck, or at least a longer tee-shirt.
Comments? Changinglanesterry@gmail.com
Or http://changinglanesterry.blogspot.com/
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Corn Hill
Betty and I are in ROchester doing the corn hill arts and crafts festival. This supposed to be a profitable show. Last year it rained much of one day, alternating with sunshine which made it hard to breath with the humidity.
Yesterday started with a substatial sale before opening time, then it rained heavily for most to the afternoon washing out any possibility of a good Saturday. We had high hopes for today but an hour from closing we are a long way from a profitable show..
The people are great including the ones who live here (they leave there door open when not at home so we can use the bathroom) and the customers are heavy on compliments. Lots of returned-from-last-year customers speak of how wonderful their pieces are from last year but we are just not selling much.
We hate to give up such a nice show but...
Yesterday started with a substatial sale before opening time, then it rained heavily for most to the afternoon washing out any possibility of a good Saturday. We had high hopes for today but an hour from closing we are a long way from a profitable show..
The people are great including the ones who live here (they leave there door open when not at home so we can use the bathroom) and the customers are heavy on compliments. Lots of returned-from-last-year customers speak of how wonderful their pieces are from last year but we are just not selling much.
We hate to give up such a nice show but...
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