I was out of town for a week, and was totally unprepared for the trip. It wasn't one I had been planning to take. After all, no one knows what day death will come to them, so there was no way to be prepared.
I went for my stepmother's funeral, which was nice, and I think she would have loved it.
It was also very hard, very emotional. It's so hard to say goodbye to anyone, even if they've lived to the ripe old age of 91. I'm going to really miss her. I guess, sooner or later, everyone will probably become an orphan. I lost my mom in 1990, my dad in 2019, and now my stepmom is gone too. The last one who would own up to being a parent for the likes of me. I guess it's time for me to be self-sufficient, eh? Hopefully, I've learned enough in my fifty years of life that I can manage from here on out. No backstop left anymore.
Speaking of being self-sufficient and in charge of my own self, I didn't write a dang thing the entire time I was on the trip. I even brought my keyboard with me, so that I could type stuff up on Google Docs. It was hectic and busy, and I used that as an excuse to take a vacation. Of course, as always happens when I do that, I don't feel like writing tonight either. I want to just keep drifting and slacking. I'll do my best not to let that take over. I've got goals for this year, and I gotta get going if I expect to achieve them. January is going to be a bad month, but I'll get going. Don't worry about me. I won't fall all the way off the wagon and find myself left behind and unable to catch up and jump back on.
In 1990, my mom died of cancer. She was 50 years old and I was only 15. It was very hard on my family. All of us kids had to accept more responsibility, including keeping an eye on ourselves now that our parent wasn't around to do something like that. My dad, I believe, had it hardest of us all. He had four kids at home, he still had all of the responsibilities to provide for them, but now also all the responsibilities of raising them up right all on his own.
For about four years, he struggled his way through this, barely scraping by and having little in the way of social or personal support. Then, in 1994, my oldest brother set my dad up with a woman that he'd met while living in North Carolina. My dad took a risk, and decided to marry this woman without really spending much time in any courting. Their positions on opposite coasts made it impossible to do that kind of thing, so he just decided, "Let's go for it."
That woman's name was Marilyn, and she became my stepmom. Things were difficult at first for us all. It took a while for us to come to grips with the situation and come to understand this new person who had arrived out of the blue and was now living in our house. She was from a very different culture than our laid back California lifestyle, and we bristled at a lot of the changes she wanted us to make.
I was at the age that I was leaving the house anyway, so it was least difficult on me. I moved on to college, got married, and started my own life. Unlike some of my older brothers and sisters, though, I had lived at home while Dad was alone, and I'd seen how desperately miserable and lonely he'd been in those years, so if Marilyn made him happy, then I figured that anything was worth it.
Dad and Marilyn, despite the irregularity of their initial connection, managed to stick it out. They stayed together for the rest of Dad's life. He passed away back in 2019, and has to be one of the only people I've ever heard of to be married for 25 years to two different people. That seems impressive to me.
As the years went by, we all grew to love an appreciate Marilyn more and more. I tried to show her my love and appreciation whenever I could. She always used to send birthday cards to everyone, and she would sign them: Love, "Mom" Marilyn. I thought that was funny or odd at first, but eventually I found it tragic, and I made it a point to try to never call Marilyn by her name anymore. She wanted to be Mom, and in the end, she deserved to be called Mom. So, whenever we sent her a card, or I saw her, or we talked on the phone, I called her Mom, and I think she really responded to that, and appreciated it very much.
Mom, sadly, has been alone for five years now since Dad passed away. It was a sudden death. He had been fine one week, then got sick the next week, and was dead the next. So, their time together was almost completely joyful. I'm really glad that there wasn't a prolonged period of decline for them like what happened with my mother when she passed. Marilyn, who hadn't had a particularly joyful life up until she met Dad, got to have a wonderful ending.
Now, Mom has gone to join Dad on the other side. Yesterday morning at about 1:15 AM, she passed away. She tripped and fell a few days ago, hitting her head and causing cranial bleeding. That progressed until her body couldn't function any longer and it shut down for good. Like with Dad, it wasn't a prolonged period of decline or a particularly traumatic or painful one, so I'm grateful for that.
I'm also very grateful to have had her in my life. She was very special to me. She was a character, as many southern folks are. I loved to listen to her talk. Her accent was fun and her personality was vibrant. Usually, all I could do was listen to her talk, because I could never get a word in edgewise anyway. I'm going to miss her a lot. She was a great replacement mother for me and has been a wonderful grandmother for my kids. I just feel honored to have been allowed to know her while I did. Thanks, Mom.
On Saturday afternoon, just a few days before Christmas, Rish's present to me came in the mail. He sent me out these three guys for use on Ankletown Station:
I was unfamiliar with these guys, but Rish found them at Ross, texted a picture to me, and asked if I thought they'd be cool on Ankletown Station. I guess they are Pacific Rim Jaegars reproduced in 4-inch scale.
They are interestingly weird figures. That one feels relatively normal, but look at this guy:
He has three arms! Not two. Not four, but three. Two on the right but only one on the left. Where have you ever seen anything like that before?
My favorite guy, though, is still this one:
I think it's because of the fact that it looks like it has a trash can or a mop bucket for a head that makes me appreciate it so much. It's definitely and interesting looking robot. And it's cool, because they shrunk them down to where they can stand beside any Star Wars figure or, in this case, a Fortnite guy.
So, once I get started on Ankletown Station, these guys will be interesting robots/droids to slot right into their place in the crowd. Thanks, Rish. And a Merry Christmas.
Freya, our younger kitten (we've had her for just under a year) is having her first Christmas with us. She's having plenty of fun attacking the ornaments on the tree, and here is a picture of her turning the presents on the tree into a special cat playground.
I wonder how fun the world would be if I was the size of a cat, and every little change a human being made was like a new playground was built in the park nearby. We humans can do it too. This makes me think of when Little Anklevich was still a baby, and we were having our backyard landscaped. They came in with a big machine and dug away at the hill, and left this giant hill of dirt behind. Of course, Little was out playing on it as soon as the workers drove away.
Sometimes, what you imagine isn't all that similar to reality. Having high expectations for something can often lead to a huge let down. Back in the day when I was doing my Big Anklevich on Toys videos regularly, I did a recurring segment called "Cheap Toy Hunting." I would show off the toys that I'd managed to get for a really good price. Most frequently they came from Ross. If you've ever been to Ross, you know that it's mostly a huge dystopian landscape. It has a small toy section that usually looks like a hurricane has recently passed through, and, for an adult toy collector like me, there's very little of the merchandise they are offering for sale that might appeal. In fact, on most days, there's nothing that might appeal.
Despite that description, I did sometimes find things worth getting, enough so that Gino Moretto, who lives in New Zealand commented on one of my videos that he wished that they had this mythical Ross place where he lived so that he could find some of these deals I was boasting about. It made me chuckle, because it just wasn't as nice as he imagined.
When I moved out to Texas, I got access to a bunch of new stores that didn't exist where I used to live. Chief among those stores was Five Below. This was a discount store where everything was marked to $5 or less, that's what the name was about. Rish was watching on YouTube, and saw a video where someone said that Five Below had the Marvel Legends Guardians of the Galaxy figures on sale for $5 a piece.
"Do you have a Five Below near you?" he asked me over the phone.
I had no idea. I'd yet to notice one, but maybe... I looked it up on Google, and turned out that there were a lot of Five Belows, including one just across the street from where I worked. I wouldn't mind having a set of Guardians of the Galaxy to display on my shelves. I should have probably run over there that very day, but. I didn't. Instead, the next time it was convenient for me, I went over. I think they still had one Rocket Raccoon, but beyond that, they just had the Ex Nihilo figure and the Adam Warlock figure that weren't from the movie.
I didn't even buy Rocket, because I didn't want one memeber of the Guardians without all the others. It had already been picked clean. I hoped that they might get another set in, and went back several more times, as well as finding a few other Five Belows that were in locations that were convenient for me and checking them out, but I never saw another Marvel Legends figure in a Five Below again.
All the same, Rish Outfield built up this vision in his mind of Five Below as this mythical place where there were amazing deals available at all times. He always asked me about what I found there, and my answer was almost invariably nothing. Rish took a vacation to Los Angeles, and while he was there, he made sure to visit Five Below. He was surprised to find that they had nothing worth getting, despite the fact that I'd been telling him that I'd found nothing at the store for months on end.
Then, they finally started opening up Five Belows right where Rish lived. He went out to them a few times, wondering if he might find a special deal because it was the Grand Opening or something, but there were none. It was the same old BS. He finally now saw Five Below as I saw it. It wasn't a mythical place, but just any other store.
It's only gotten worse as inflation has forced the prices on everything upward. They're probably going to have to change the name of the place at some point. Ten Below...or smarter yet, Twenty Below, because inflation ain't stopping, no matter what chucklehead we put into the white house. From Five Below to Twenty Below, though? Does that mean Global Warming isn't real? Ha ha!
There's one more mythical store out there for Rish. This store called Ollie's, which is a big discount retailer on the East Coast, is frequently talked about on the toy collecting sites that Rish goes to. The posters there would extol the amazing deals they found there. Rish would tell me about them, and sometimes I'd see them as well, and wish that I could go there.
Then, one day, I saw an ad for the grand opening of Ollie's in a city...relatively close to me. It could have been worse. Houston is a big area, and it can take an hour and a half to get from one place to another even though you're driving eighty miles an hour on the freeway most of the time. This one, though, was only about 45 minutes away...sadly, it was nowhere near anything else, so if I went there, it was solely for Ollie's.
I went out to the grand opening. I even did a Big Anklevich on Toys video about it.
It was very busy, and I was a little unimpressed by their stock of toys. I didn't buy anything, and I didn't go back for quite a while, but eventually, somebody found something at an Ollie's somewhere that I hoped I would find at mine too, and I went looking again. I found a few good things over the few years that the store has been there. So, I don't hate the place like I have grown to hate Five Below, but it was such a horrifying slog to drive all the way out there, and so disappointing if I didn't find anything, that I almost never went.
Rish continued to tell me about things that people supposedly found there, and I think he still sees it as a mythical place, like he once thought of Five Below. I suspect that Ollie's would probably live up to his imaginings a lot better than Five Below ever could.
Well, the other day, I saw a commercial on TV that caught my eye. Something about an Ollie's Grand opening in Houston. Where was it going to be? I looked it up online, and found this:
Six grand openings. and when I took this picture, it was the Wednesday before they were to happen. Well, most of those locations weren't near me, but a couple of them were, so I figured I'd have to stop in and see what they were like.
Friday, the day after the grand opening in an attempt to avoid the crowds a little, I went out to one of the Ollie's that is near a Ross that I usually go to frequently. I took this picture, because I thought it kind of showed Rish's dream stripmall.
A Ross with an Ollie's right next door. Wow!
They still had someone at a table just inside the door handing out cookies to people who came to shop...I didn't partake, but I suppose others thought it was nice. They had a lot of toys, particularly Marvel Legends, though they were all figures that I was uninterested in. They had the Dungeons & Dragons Owlbears there too. I considered getting one, but I didn't need that. It would just go in a storage tub and stay there. They did have a Star Wars guy that I grabbed and carried around with me while I looked. It was the Vintage Collection Incinerator Trooper who also comes with a little Grogu that can use the force to turn away the flames.
I figured I would get it, but then I saw the line, which was very long due to the whole brand-new-store thing, and I changed my mind and put it back. It'll probably still be there later. They had an awful lot of them.
I suppose I couldn't have bought it anyway, because I made a pledge not to buy any more stuff for Ankletown Station until I had at least one building created. I still haven't done that, so I'm glad I put it back...though I'd completely forgotten about that particular pledge.
Okay, I don't know why I wrote this entire huge post about this crap. I guess, the point was to say that mythical stores don't ever live up to their hype, and now that I can go to Ollie's all the time, I'm sure it will fall further and further down in my estimation with each visit. Then again, maybe I'll see all the good stuff before everybody else plunders it, and I can be the guy who makes the videos about his finds. Who knows?
Hey, everyone. If you're one of the six people who regularly read my blog, then you might be wondering why for the last few weeks, I've been pumping out post after post of books from my shelf. Why didn't I have anything new to say? Well, those were posts that I wrote way ahead of time to hit while I was out of town. I have a sickness in that I feel the need to post on the blog every day, even if I'm not around.
We just got back yesterday from a two week vacation to Yellowstone and Canada. We drove all the way up there, a grueling two day affair that required an 18-hour day to get from Houston to Denver as well as a shorter, but still lengthy, day to get from Denver to Yellowstone.
We had fun there, though. We saw a lot of things and did a ton. I took a bunch of pictures that I'll share with you too. First off, we went to the visitor center.
That's always a good idea, so that you know what the most interesting things to see are and how to find them. Yellowstone is really neat. I guess it's a supervolcano, so the whole friggin' place is on top of a giant caldera. That makes an awful lot of the place superheated, and water and steam comes bubbling and spurting up all over the place.
We went to several pools like this one.
They're not the kind of pools you want to go swimming in, though. Most of them are much hotter even than a jacuzzi. They're closer to a pot of boiling water. So, unless you want to look like stew meat, you gotta steer clear and stay on the walkway. Here's another one we saw.
Nice, huh?
Sometimes, the pools are big enough, they figure they can't just call them pools, so you get one like this:
Yikes. Don't get in the lake if it's steaming, folks. It's not worth it.
There are some other things that Yellowstone is known for. We saw the Fountain Paint Pots.
And at Mammoth Hot Springs, we saw a few things, like this:
We didn't only look at volcanic stuff. We even went hiking in some spots...the spots where the ground isn't superheated, anyway.
Of course, Yellowstone is most famous for geysers, and we saw a few of those.
Steady Geyser was neat. So was Clepsydra Geyser.
Or this one, which was really going!
Of course, we made sure to see the most famous one of all.
We were even there the day that Biscuit Basin exploded...we weren't actually on Biscuit Basin at the time, though, so I don't have any pictures to share with you of that. Hopefully, you enjoyed this pictorial review of my vacation. I hope the majesty of the landscape really entertained and awed you like it did me.
Yesterday at about 3:00 PM, power was finally restored to my house.
I've never been so happy to see a light turn on when I flipped the switch in my life.
Of course, once the power came on, that meant that there was a lot of work to do. We had to deal with everything that we've been forced to let slide all week. The laundry machine is gonna be so hot by the end of the day. The AC didn't just come back perfectly, but required some messing with it. The garage door sensors had been bumped and the door wouldn't close, so we had to fix that. Etc.
We had some nervous moments not long after the power came on, because a storm blew through, and our power dipped back out over and over again. We were all so traumatized, that we were expecting it to finally die and stay gone, but instead, it powered through (see what I did there?), and it's still on even after the rain.
We're back in business, and I'm so glad to get back to normal.
That's the fence that closes in my backyard. It runs between the house and the garage, and the winds that Hurricane Beryl brought with her ripped it right out of the ground. The fence was old and in pretty bad shape, so I'm not too surprised, but we were limping along just fine with that fence, and now we're going to have to replace it, because our backyard is wide open now. It's one thing if you just have a lawn back there, and a complete other thing if you have a pool.
Monday when the winds weren't too bad, my wife and kids went out and partially disassembled it, and shoved all the boards that they could into the garage. Then, Tuesday morning, when I finally got to see what my house looked like in the daylight, I went out and disassembled it the rest of the way, dragging all the wood out to the front curb and piling it up. Eventually, the city will send a crew around to gather all the debris from our street. I don't know how long that will take. It can take months...especially after a huge citywide disaster like this one.
All the fences at our house are in need of fixing, and now after Beryl it's more pressing. The gate on the other side of the garage has been partially pulled off its hinges...the upper hinge is broken off there.
And there's this bit of fence in the back too. We've been propping up this sagging fence with a 2 x 4 for a while, and it stayed up, but it looks like the resistance of the 2 x 4 broke the top piece apart.
I guess it's time to get a the fence redone. No more waiting allowed, it seems. It's gonna be expensive though, and probably worse since its in the aftermath of a hurricane and hundreds upon hundreds of people are in need of them...hey, join my Patreon if you haven't already. I sure could use it.
Okay, it's Monday afternoon now, and Beryl has mostly rolled over us and is moving on by tonight, things should be calmed down again.
I spent the night at my news station last night. They called me in on Sunday, and had me on the clock until 2:00 AM. Then I went up the stairs and crawled into the bed I'd made for myself. I brought an air mattress from home, as well as a blanket and a pillow. I had pajamas and a change of clothes for today too. I actually slept pretty well, maybe even better than I do at home normally. My bedroom has a huge window that faces east, and the sun comes streaming in very early in the morning, so I have a hard time sleeping in too far past dawn, but at the station, I was deep in the bowels of the building where nothing but artificial light can shine, so it was dark much later into the morning.
When I finally got out of bed, I went out and looked at what was going on outside. The wind was still blowing pretty strongly, but the rain wasn't too bad.
I got in contact with my wife for a little bit, and she was able to tell me that my house had no power, and that the fence that goes between our house and our garage had blown down. That's not good. We're going to have to get that fixed. We can't be missing a fence with a yard that has a pool. That's not safe. She couldn't show me what it looked like, though, because it was still too windy to go out and check it out. Later, they disassembled it and piled the wood in the garage, but she still couldn't send a photo, because our cell service was down and it wouldn't allow a photo text to send.
I broke down my in building campsite, deflating my air mattress and folding up my blanket. When I took it all out to the car to store it for the rest of the day, I had to thank my lucky stars that everything was okay. The tree next to where my truck was parked had acquired quite a lean from the storm. Some more wind might have sent that thing over on top of my truck. The row of parking stalls just behind me had a branch down on the grass. That would have at least left a dent if it came down on top of a car.
Things weren't that tough for me at work, though. I could hear the wind and rain going on the roof all night long, but it never felt dangerous. It's a pretty big building, and it's also brand new. I started work at this station just a few months after they opened the new building, so the likelihood of any big trouble was small. The power stayed on...although it might be out and we could be running on generators, I'm not sure, to tell the truth. The water is still flowing as well, so flushing the toilets works just fine too. That was an issue during the freeze a few years ago, but not this time around.
Food, for a guy like me, has been a little more difficult. I brought a great big tub of meat, and at that for my breakfast this morning. My other options were pizza:
Or crackers and granola bars:
Or candy:
So, I'm glad I planned ahead. That meat I ate should last me the whole day, and we can see what the deal is tomorrow. Hopefully, our power will be back, and our fridge and freezer will not be full of spoiled food.
I guess I'll have to do updates as the days go on about power and stuff. But this is where we're at so far. Talk to you again soon.
Hurricane Beryl came in from the Atlantic and shot straight across the Caribbean Sea, messing up several of the southern islands all the way down near Venezuela before moving a little north and thumping Jamaica. The projected track for the storm was for it to continue going west across Mexico and maybe even as low as Guatemala.
Beryl had other plans, though. She wanted to show us just how little we can actually rely on weather forecasters, I think. She took a hard right turn, and skimmed her way up the coast of Mexico. Originally, it looked like the southernmost regions of Texas might get a little bit of Beryl's outer band moisture. All of a sudden, it looked like Beryl would be coming aground in Corpus Christi. That was close enough that it might inconvenience us all the way up here in Houston.
This morning, I woke up and came out to the living room, and my wife announced that Beryl had continued her drift, and now it was probably coming aground in Matagorda County. Guess what viewing area that county falls in. That's right, Houston. It was all the way up to us now.
Matagorda County is way over on the west side, and it's not that strong of a storm right now. It was a category five when it hit the Grenadines, but it's not even a hurricane anymore while I type these words. It is expected to be a category 1 hurricane when it hits, which is the weakest it can be and still be called a hurricane.
It probably won't be anything catastrophic, but it is catastrophic for my weekend.
I got a text from my boss this morning. We're switching to Hurricane coverage mode, and it was requested that I come in Sunday by 8:00 PM to back up the other editor there, and hold the fort down until 2:00 AM.
The nice thing is that it'll be overtime. I'll get some extra cash for the effort. However, I'll probably have to stay the night at the station. 2:00 AM is right about when the storm will be hitting Houston the hardest. It probably won't be safe to drive home, so I'll be camping out at the station again.
I'm kind of annoyed for some reason. I guess it's because this stupid storm is supposed to be in Guatemala not way the heck up here. Leave me alone, Beryl. I wanted to have a nice weekend, dang it.
Okay, I showed off my flag for Canada Day a few days ago, so I have to do at least as much for Independence Day.
Here's my flags as they are these days, with both the national and state flag. And, this is the Big Anklevich blog post for Independence Day, so there has to be some shots of my toys too. Here's a few of the best pictures to celebrate the holiday with.
Does this happen to everyone else? We use wood glue about once a year, and every time that we do, the bottle looks like this:
Is there a way to use wood glue without it creating a plug that seals the spigot off after the first use?
I always have to take the whole lid off and squeeze the glue out of the bottle that way. It doesn't make a lot of sense to even make a spigot if it's going to dry full of glue after the first use every time. Why not just have a regular screw top lid? That's what you will resort to in the end anyway.
