July 28, 2012
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Auto Repair Excitement, Family Fun
auto repair, Bug convertible, New Beetle, Volkswagen, VW dealer, VW repair, wiring harness
I don’t mind paying a reasonable fee to an auto repair shop, but I refuse to be gouged.
Our 2006 Volkswagen New Beetle convertible needed an O2 sensor replaced. I had Patty drop it off at the VW dealer next to her office in Silver Spring, Maryland. I don’t want to name the dealer, but their name starts with a D and ends with an ARCARS.
They wanted to charge a $120 diagnostic fee, an hour of labor at $126 and $231 for the sensor, for a total (not including tax) of $477.
I immediately balked at the diagnostic fee, which they immediately agreed to waive. It was very immediate. But that still left an estimate of $357.
I looked that O2 sensor up on the Web and found that a Bosch replacement costs less than $60.
So I’m going to pay the dealer the $120 diagnostic fee and have the car serviced somewhere else.
I’ll continue this saga here on my blog, because it’s mine and I can if I want to, and you’ll be hearing more as it happens!!! This should be interesting.
July 26, 2012
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Family Fun, Pets
Boston terrier, laptop toy, Murphy, surfing the Net
My grand-daughter Maddie shows Murphy how to surf the Net.
July 25, 2012
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Family Fun, Old Photos
Brandon, Florida, internal light meter, Kodachrome film, Miami Vice, Nikkormat FT3, Nikon, North Manhattan Avenue, Paul Simon, SLR, Tampa, wading pool
Actually, it was 25 years ago, but what the heck! Here are some photos of the family when we lived on North Manhattan Avenue in Tampa.
Colleen is shown here watching one of her then-favorite shows, Miami Vice. Not quite sure what a three-year-old got from watching that, but I expect she loved the music and the action of it. I love Neenie’s expression here; the photo itself isn’t all that great.
Next we have Aaron in his wading pool in the backyard. The colors are just so vivid in this Kodachrome photo. Gosh, I do miss Kodachrome film! Paul Simon had it right when he sang:
Kodachrome
You give us those nice bright colors
You give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away”
It wasn’t Mama that took our Kodachrome away, but the digital-camera revolution.
The camera used here was my Nikon Nikkormat FT3, which, in my experience, had the best internal light meter of any SLR I ever used. Nothing else ever came even close.
We wind up with a Christmas-time photo taken at Patty’s brother Billy’s house in Brandon, Florida in 1986. When I posted this photo on Facebook without specifying the location where it was taken, my sister-in-law Sheila immediately commented, “Hey; that was our couch!” Yes; Sheila; it certainly was.
Shown are Neenie, Aaron and Patty.
July 24, 2012
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Family Fun, Interesting Places, Old Photos
alligator gars, Caltex Glasgow, foreign ships, Highway 82, Intracoastal Waterway, national flags, Sabine Pass, ship chandlery, Texaco tanker, Texas
My dad rented a big house in the summer of 1959 on Highway 82 in Sabine Pass, Texas, right on the Intracoastal Waterway where it met the Sabine River. This remote place must have been close to an airport my dad liked flying out of; there wasn’t another house for miles. As the photo shows, huge tankers and other ships would pass within 100 feet or so of our front yard, all day and night long. Sometimes they be lined up like cars on a highway.
Those boats were enormous; the one in this photo is typical; it’s the Texaco tanker Caltex Glasgow, and it was 524 feet long, according to a Net history of Texaco tankers.
Being stuck out in the middle of nowhere was boring for a seven-year-old kid. My only companion besides my brother was an ancient black man named Jim, who lived rent-free on the property in a ramshackle frame house. Jim wore a big white cowboy hat and made a living catching and penning alligator gars in the river and bayous and selling them to folks. Gars are ferocious fish, as much as seven feet long and well over 150 pounds each, as I learned watching Jim feed them horsemeat scraps every evening.
I followed Jim everywhere, as he was quite a storyteller, though some of his history was a tad off. He told me his daddy had been a slave freed by President Teddy Lincome, and that President Garfield had been shot by a maniac named Charley Guitar (close; it was Charles Guiteau).
Other than pestering Jim, there was little to do, but my mom didn’t like me getting close to that pen full of alligator gars.
My dad solved this problem by buying me, at a ship chandlery, a big cardboard box of about twenty three-foot by five-foot flags of various countries and a little flagpole. When a foreign ship went by our front yard, I’d put their flag on the pole and wave it with all my might. My mom wouldn’t let me walk across the highway to the Waterway, but usually someone on the ship would see me waving their country’s flag and I’d be rewarded with a mighty blast from the ship’s horn. Sometimes the fellows on the ship would yell and wave to me. It took about ten minutes for each ship to go by, and I’d see many ships a day.
It became a pretty nice summer, after all.
July 23, 2012
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Family Fun, Interesting Places, Old Photos
Buddy Holly, Christmas Festival, Elvis and Chuck Berry, float plane, Jane Quinn, John Quinn, Kodak Signet 80, Mexico City, Mississippi, Nikon, Pascagoula, Pascagoula High School, Pascagoula Marching Band, Puss 'n Boots cat-food factory, Santa, sea plane, ship dock, transister radio, Western Auto, WTIX
These are probably the first photos I ever took, using my Dad’s Kodak Signet 80 camera, which was Kodak’s highest-end camera at that time. It was a 35mm rangefinder camera with interchangeable lenses. My dad picked it up in Mexico City when someone there stole his Nikon rangefinder from his hotel room. At that time, of course, SLR cameras were quite rare; Nikon didn’t offer one until a year or so later.
The Signet 80 was a great camera and totally silent, unlike the clunk-producing early SLRs and I used that camera well into the 1970s, even after I had Nikon SLRs and medium-format cameras of my own.
So these were taken in Pascagoula, Mississippi in 1958. I was in the first grade. The Christmas Festival that year was a big deal for me, because my dad flew Santa onto the river with his float plane, and a little boat picked Santa up from my dad’s plane and brought him to the docks. Mr. John Quinn, my dad’s friend who owned the menhaden plant mentioned earlier, lifted me up onto a 55-gallon drum because I was little. Mr. Quinn is in the dark-blue-black-and-white checked shirt in the second photo, and his wife, Jane, is standing next to him in a red-and-black checked shirt. Here comes Santa on the small boat.
In this crowd scene, you can see the Puss ‘n Boots cat-food factory in the background. That’s where I learned to ride my bicycle; there was a big concrete area in front of the factory which was vacant on the weekends. I had gotten a seven-transistor radio from Western Auto (it was sapphire blue) and I taped it to the handle bars of my bike so I could listen to WTIX (Tiger Radio!!!) from New Orleans as I rode around. They played Elvis and Chuck Berry and especially Buddy Holly.
In this photo, you can see the Pascagoula High School Marching Band. Hard to believe these lovely young ladies would be in their 70s today.
July 22, 2012
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Family Fun, Food, Interesting Places, Old Jobs, Old Photos
Bob DeVIlle, carambola, Florida, Kiwi fruit, Naples, Nebraska Avenue, produce department, Publix Supermarkets, Tampa, Viet Nam, Winn DIxie
When I was in high school, I was recruited from a two-week stint at Winn Dixie to Publix Supermarkets (Where Shopping is a Pleasure!) by Bob DeVille, who managed the Naples store and was one of the smartest men I’ve ever known. He came to our house and told my mom and dad I would be better off working for him. I ended up spending 14 years at Publix, though I often got frustrated and quit. Mr. DeVille would wait a month or so and then call me up to see if I’d calmed down and was ready to return. I usually did.
I got into the produce department because I had read that an agricultural job could keep you from being drafted and sent to Viet Nam. After I while, I was transferred to Tampa and eventually I got my own produce department in a tiny art-deco Publix on Nebraska Avenue. I loved that store and the staff and customers. Patty and I were just married, and I was happy to have a job during a tough recession.
I’d work hard to make creative displays, using hand-lettered signs and the contrasts in colors and shapes of the produce to create excitement and interest. Fresh produce wasn’t a big deal at that time, and most of the unusual stuff I tried to sell didn’t. I’d have recipe cards and samples available but folks didn’t want to know what a Kiwi fruit was or to give a carambola a try. I was lucky to sell half a case of romaine to every twenty cases of iceburg lettuce.
Working in a supermarket was a great way to learn what ads worked and what ads didn’t; what displays moved merchandise and what displays didn’t, and I was lucky enough to work for a store manager who let me try anything that I dreamed up. I’d draw little graphs of where people stopped in my little department, what they put in their shopping cart and what they didn’t.
On the side, I’d do freelance writing, photography and graphics, and when I made more money one year doing that than I did at Publix, I left for good. But I learned a lot and met Patty there, and consider myself most lucky for the experience.
July 22, 2012
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Family Fun, Food, Interesting Places, Old Photos
beignets, Café Du Monde, Farmer's Market, Jeff Page, Louisiana, New Orleans, Plymouth Savoy, Steamer New Orleans historic marker
We continue our review of old color photos with one of the New Orleans of 1965.
When I was a kid we lived in Louisiana for a few years, and going to the Café Du Monde at the Farmer’s Market in New Orleans was always a big treat. The puffy and powdered beignets with the strong coffee in teeny cups was something I looked forward to. The location, then as now, was by the levee and the old Jax Beer factory.
In this photo are my mom, me with the glasses and my younger brother, Jeff. The nifty beige car behind my mom is a 1961 Plymouth Savoy.
July 21, 2012
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Art, Family Fun, Interesting Places
Aaron Page, Abraham Lincoln, art association, Calvert House, Clinton, Colleen Arnold, Franklin's Restaurant, Hyattsville, Hyattsville Community Arts Alliance, John Wilkes Booth, Karen Allen, Maryland, Page Bros Prints, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Surratt House museum
My son, Aaron, and I are both members of the Hyattsville Community Arts Alliance, and are proud to announce that six of our works are now on display (and sale!) at local restaurants; four at Franklin’s and two at the Calvert House.
Aaron does his digital paintings from scratch on the PC and I recreate and revise ancient comic book covers on the Mac. These images are then printed on canvas and placed on wooden stretchers by my daughter, Colleen.
So it’s a family project and we are having a lot of fun doing it!
The giant copper vats shown in the photo collage are where they brew their own beers and ales at Franklin’s. If you remember the actress Karen Allen from Raiders of the Lost Ark, she’s sometimes seen at the Calvert House, which has been her favorite restaurant from childhood.
The company I started with my brother, Jeff, is called Page Bros Prints and you can see our website at www.PageBrosPrints.com. We have some historic prints for sale at the Surratt House Museum in Clinton, Maryland. That was where John Wilkes Booth stopped for some previously stashed stuff after he shot Abraham Lincoln.
July 21, 2012
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Airplanes I've Known, Family Fun, Old Photos
airplane ramp, float planes, Mississippi, Pascagoula, Pascagoula RIver, Piper Super Cub, sea plane
My dad was a nut about airplanes like I am about guitars.
In 1958, we were living in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and Dad bought a brand-new Piper Super-Cub, had it fitted with pontoons at the Piper factory, and then had a ramp built on the Pascagoula River complete with a gas pump and turntable platform above the ramp so the plane could be easily swung around. I can’t imagine what that whole setup cost or why he felt the need to do it.
July 21, 2012
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Family Fun, Interesting Places, Old Photos
Google street view, Jeff Page, Port Arthur, Texas
Google Street Views is so cool! Thanks to it, I was able to find the house we lived in over 50 years ago, as seen in these two photos.
The photo on the left is from 1961, with my first-grade brother Jeff in the foreground. On the right is the Google street view, present day. The three-car garage has been modified to what looks like living space, but otherwise it looks much the same.
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