Author: Mark

When Kim and I were getting married, I was making sure my brothers were unable to find my 1977 Firebird!  I asked Grandma Madge if I could hide it in her garage! I had planned it so well. Kim’s brother Bart would drive it to the church as we were ready to leave the wedding reception. We got married in Oakland on a Saturday morning, then drove back to Grass Valley, arrived at Grandma’s house, put the Firebird in the garage, shut the door, locked it, and put the key in the normal hiding place, met my Dad and rode with him to his house. My mom was cooking a late lunch for the family. I sat at the kitchen bar talking to Stan and Ralph when the telephone rang. Stan answered it, “Its Kim’s brother Bart” he said as he handed me the phone. It was a corded phone, so I wasn’t able to leave the room. Bart had lost the instructions I wrote for him, and wanted me to tell him where the house and the key was. I talked to him quietly, hoping Stan and Ralph weren’t paying attention, and I thought I got away with it!

We were in the middle of opening gifts, when someone whispered to me, “your brothers found your car and it looks great!” I left Kim standing there and ran outside! There was my car all decorated and my two brothers with several of their friends standing around with big smirks on their faces! I have to say they were very nice by not putting any writing on my paint job. They wrote all over the windows and the tires, and they taped crate paper from the front of the engine to the back of the trunk. Also, Bart and Lisa, the Maid of Honor, betrayed us by filling the inside of the car with rice. They opened our luggage and filled our cloths with rice! I tried to get into the car but someone had slid the seat up really close to the stirring wheel. The tracks were full of rice and the seat wouldn’t slide back, so I got in the car, with the steering wheel up against my stomach. Then Stan came up to my window and asked: “Did you really think you could hide your car from your two brothers?”

In the 80’s my family, and our dear friends Jeff and Karen would go camping for a week at MacKerricher State Park just north of Fort Bragg CA. Our first year there, we asked the Park Ranger if there were any sites that were in a private setting. He told us to check out site 77. Site 77 was small, but it had brush growing all around it except for the trail leading to it from the parking space. Both Families had large tents, and the only way to make them fit on the small site was to have the tents actually touching each other. The next morning we had bacon with our breakfast, and Kim dug a deep hole and buried the bacon grease. That evening we sat at the picnic table playing UNO, when Jeff said “there’s a huge skunk over there staring at us!” “Yea right!” I said. I thought he was joking. “Really, there is a huge skunk right behind you!” He said! As I turned around, I saw a very large skunk looking right at us! I jumped up and ran around to the other side of the table. It wasn’t very brave of Jeff and me, as we used our wives to shield us from the spray.

We finally got the skunk to leave the camp site and then we went to bed. It started raining, and a pool of water started to form on the roof of our tent. As I took a broom handle and pushed the water off, we heard Jeff and Karen yell, “you’re getting us all wet!” The water had gone through the door of their tent landing on their heads. Later that night we heard Jeff get out of bed, and a couple of seconds later we heard “Shew Shew Shew!” then “Don’t you dare spray me”, that’s when Kim and I started cracking up! The next morning Jeff told us “when I got up last night, there were skunks everywhere! There were Mama Skunks, Daddy Skunks, Children and Baby Skunks; it looked like the ground was moving because there were so many Skunks!” We looked over at the grease pit, and the skunks had dug the hole deeper then Kim had originally dug it. We had been eating popcorn while playing UNO the night before, and when the skunk startled us we knocked the popcorn all over the ground. The next morning there was no popcorn to be found anywhere on the ground.

The third day we cooked our breakfast, but this time we put the grease in a garbage bag, and took it to the dumpster. We then headed to the beach where Jeff and I found this log, and we rolled it down to the ocean. We stood on the log as it was moving back and forth with the waves. I had planned to only get my feet wet, however, in only a short time I was wet up to my knees, then it was my waist, and a few minutes later we were 100 feet off the beach hanging onto this log with seals popping up around us in the water. When we were done playing with the seals, we went back to camp and we got cleaned up, so that we could go to Fort Bragg and have dinner at a place called the Redwood Cook House. On our way out we stopped at the front gate and told the Park Ranger all about the Skunks, and we asked if there was anything he could do about them. The Park Ranger replied “Sorry, the Skunks were here first!”

My co-worker Scott is a really nice guy, but he has this one very strange thing that he does! He puts Mustard on a lot of the foods that he eats! When he first got hired, I witnessed him eating Saltines with Mustard on them. I thought this was kind of weird, but I forgot about it as soon as lunch was over. Then one day I saw him dipping his pretzels in Mustard, and again that seemed kind of weird! Then I saw him putting Mustard on his popcorn, and I asked him, do you put mustard on everything you eat? “I love mustard” he told me, “and I put it on a lot of the food I eat.” When he eats a lot of mustard he gets this really bad gas! Sometimes I walk down an isle where he is working and I have to turn around and run, the smell is so bad that your eyes water! So when I see him eating food with mustard on it, I try to avoid him for the rest of the day. You know he’s released his Mustard Gas, when you see co-workers running in all directions!

You should see Scott when his mustard bottle becomes empty, this grouchy look comes over his face, and he goes on a search for some Ketchup or Miracle Whip. I have seen Scott put mustard on Tuna Fish, mustard on Pickles, (That almost made me throw up) mustard on Cheese, mustard on Top Ramen, mustard on French Fries, mustard on Eggs, mustard on Mash Potato’s, mustard on Burritos, mustard on Toast, and Mustard on Scones. I thought I had seen everything he could possibly put mustard on. Then last week the Store Manager bought our team breakfast. French toast from a place called “Kneaders”. We all sat down, spread the butter on the two huge slices of French toast, and poured that great tasting maple syrup on. As I was about to take another savory bite, I saw Scott go to the refrigerator and pull the mustard out. He poured the mustard on his plate and dipped his toast in it. Right about that time the Store Manager looked at Scott’s plate, and said “you got to be kidding me…You set that great tasting syrup off to the side and use Mustard instead!” “What can I say?” Scott replied “I like Mustard!”

When I was dating Kim, her only source of heat was a pot belly wood stove! She had a lot of wood, but it was all in big rounds that needed to be split. So I took my 10lb maul out to her place and I started splitting wood for her. I was just about done, and her brother Bart drove up. He asked me what kind of tool I was using. He had never seen a maul before, he and his dad always used a sledge-hammer and steel wedges to split wood. It looked easy to him, so he asked me if he could try my maul out. I knew it was a little heavy for him, because he is smaller than I am, and he would have better control with an 8lb maul. But I said sure, but please don’t miss because 10lb maul handles were hard to find! He said he would be careful, so I handed him the maul. I set a round up for him, he took a big breath, swung the maul, and over shot the round. The handle hit the round and snapped the maul right off the handle. You should have seen the look on Bart’s face!

Kim and I went from store to store looking for a handle. All the stores had 8lb handles, but nobody had 10lb handles! I gave up on looking for a handle, and I was thinking I would just go out and buy a new maul. Sometime had past, and Kim and I were in Auburn and we stopped at a store to look for a tool I needed, and low and behold I found a 10lb handle! I bought it and took it home and put the maul on the handle. I then put the little wedges in the end, then I soaked it in water for a couple of days. I finally had a maul again. One day Bart was up at Kim’s place, and we were having a good time visiting and listening to some Jethro Tull. He was getting ready to leave, and I walked him out to his car. He saw the maul leaning against the building and picked it up. He looked at me, and I said don’t even think about it! He set the maul down, and with a smile on his face he said, that’s good advice!