Enjoy this moment for this moment is your life.

Happy Fathers Day

So I thought I would kill two birds with one stone this week. Post a childhood memory, and say Happy Fathers Day to my dad. I chose to write this week on memories surrounding my house, mostly because, as I mention in my last memory, my dad is full of inventions, and when I talk about memories of my house, I can't help but talk about all the fun and interesting things my dad made for our house.

My House

I was one of those rare people who lived in the same house from the time I was born until I graduated from high school. Since I was one of the youngest in my family, my parents had already done all the moving around before I was born, and settled down to this house a year or two before I was born. I loved my house, it was big enough, but not too big. We had a big yard and a pasture. There was plenty of room outside to explore and let our imaginations run wild.

This is a picture of our house from the front. My mom always kept everything nice and neat and always had beautiful flowers planted all around our house.

Here is a view looking out the back door. This is obviously in early spring so everything is pretty barren. As I mentioned before, we had a large yard with a HUGE garden, yes that whole dirt patch in the back is all garden! The front part had fruit trees and it is where we grew pumpkin and squash, and decorative gourds. It also had a root cellar, that you can't really see. It was basically a hole in the ground with a little wooden door. We kept potatoes and carrots in it over the winter. It was super scary, but if you were brave enough, you could usually catch a few frogs down there.

The back garden was where all the major action happened: Peas, beans, carrots, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, melons cucumbers, strawberry's and raspberries were the usual produce back there. Here is a picture of me and a friend and my nephew nick podding a mountain of peas from our garden this would have been just one of many pickings and only a third of what there was to pod because Nancy and my brother Greg would have had their own piles:

Having a garden was great most of the time. Just about anytime during the summer there was something fun ready to eat. You could almost always find some raspberries or strawberries to eat and in the early summer there were fresh peas. We liked to eat them out of the pod or sometimes, pod and all, if the peas were little enough. The bad thing about having a garden was the weeding. Every week my sister and I had to go out and hoe and hand weed 7 rows each and as you can see they were not short rows. We would often race to see who could get done the fastest. It usually ended in tears, with one or the other accusing of cheating or not weeding good enough. I always was so glad when the plants got big enough the weeding got alot easier because the weeds couldn't compete with the big plants. But big plants led to the other drawback, Harvest time, there was raspberries to pick, peas to pod, and beans to snap. My mom was really into canning, so when the peas or beans were ready we would be stuck down in our basement for what seemed like hours podding or snapping. She would get huge bushel baskets full and divide them between my sister and I and we would pod or snap till our fingers were green and sore. One time Nancy and I really wanted to go out and play, so we came up with a great plan: we podded about half of the peas, and then shoved the rest under the podded shells in the garbage. My mom was no dummy, she saw our half full bowls of peas, and found our not so cleverly hidden peas in the garbage. I don't think we got to play that day.

Inventions
My dad was an electrical engineer who worked at the governments nuclear testing facility, but I think he was an inventor at heart. Our house and yard were full of his creations. He was also inventing things to help people, he made a stand for my grandma's easy chair, so she could get in and out of it easier with her bad knees. He invented an electronic device to amplify someone talking, my grandpa had a disease that made it so he could only talk in mumbled whispers so it was to help him communicate easier. He also helped my brother invent some equipment for his bottled water factory. Around our house he invented: a weight machine, rowing machine, an art table for me, It had a top that could be lowered flat like a desk or raised up like an easel. We even had a solar collector that took up a big portion of the back of our house, it collected solar energy and heated the water in our house (that is when it was sunny, the rest of the time we had a standard gas or electric water heater), and lastly his greenhouses: the earliest one was on the back of our house, it was very tall and had a door you could walk into, inside were climbing tomatoes, lettuce, cauliflower and cucumbers. Later on he made greenhouses that were portable. thet were long domes out of PVC and plastic, they had sophisticated watering systems and people were always stopping and asking about them. I think he ended up even making a few for people.

The most memorable of all his inventions were the following: In addition to the awsome swimming pool that I already told you about, we had a really cool playhouse, which he salvaged from an old shack/farmhouse on the property next to ours. They were going to tear it down, but my dad saved it and moved it to our back yard. He put new siding on it and a new roof. Then one half was used as a storage shed and the other half was our playhouse. We loved that thing and spent hours out there decorating. At one point he even let us paint the walls, and we got the old carpet from our house when my mom got new. We thought we could probablly live out there despite the fact there was no water or electricity.

This last invention was definitely a family favorite, and I have to say I think we all miss it a bit. Since it wouldn't fit into the new house they had to say goodbye to our table my dad invented. I even helped him make it. I remember it was a surprise for my mom and I helped him sand the legs on the benches and watched him attach legs to the table. As you can see from the picture below it was a round table, it had curved padded benches that went all around, and the best part was in the middle. I wish I could have found a better picture, but if you look closely you can see in the middle is a huge round table that spun. My mom would just set food on it then you could spin it to whatever food you needed. It was also great for games, you would just set the game board in the middle, and then you could turn it to move your guy, instead of asking someone else to do it for you. Another fun trick we learned, and I'm sure my dad did not intend it to be used for this, was you could sit in the middle of it and get spun like a merry go round, that was lots of fun, but I'm sure we got in lots of trouble, whenever we got caught doing it.

This is the best picture I could find of the table in my limited picture stash. I think this of a little birthday party my mom threw for me from left to right. Tiffany, Me, DeNiece, Krista, and Nancy.

This is the only other picture I have of the table, I threw this one in because it shows the benches I helped my dad make. Don't you love my awesome pegged pants? This was at a family New Years Eve party. In the background are an assortment of inlaws, my sister Janet, and nieces and nephews.

Weekend Fun

I didn't want to do two separate posts so I threw this one in too. We have been lucky enough to have some visitors this weekend and last weekend. And Shaun's yummy strawberry pie to go with both. Last weekend Shaun's brother Josh came with his wife Jenny and their two kids Braden and Tyler. We tried to go cray fishing, but everything was so flooded that it didn't work out. Later they came for pie and rock band. The girls had fun playing with their cousins.

This weekend my sister Laura and my niece Alexis came to stay. Alexis is getting so tall! She is just two years older than Kaylee but already taller than me. Sydnie thought she was the greatest thing ever and followed her around all day. I didn't get any pictures, but my brother Mike and his wife Jenny came over too, and we had a marshmallow roast and more strawberry pie. Laura had come to go to the Utah Valley home show. It was fun to have her stay.

Sydnie enjoying the pie, mostly the whipped cream. While Josh and Shaun get rock band set up in the background.

I wish I had a better picture of the whole crew but at least I sort of got Braden in this one. You can just see him enjoying his pie (sort of, "well I really don't like this pie, aunt Jenn") on the end.