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Everyone has their personal superpower — and their personal kryptonite; that proverbial Achilles heel that succeeds in thwarting them no matter how they try to work around it.

My kryptonite is people… Specifically when having to interact with them.

See, I suffer from some fairly debilitating social anxiety. It’s serious enough that it even affects me in my video games — where if some random person walks up and starts typing at me, I’ll panic and log off.

Really.

This can make it a bit difficult to cultivate friendships, as you can imagine. The few friends I have tend to be the exact opposite of me socially and will undeterredly strike up many-hour conversations with any random person they encounter. Which I envy a bit.

I also assume this is why I end up getting comfortable enough around them to open up a bit; they don’t take no for and answer and just keep trying until I stop running away.

I know this is a weakness, and I try to ‘fix it’ by putting myself into controlled situations where I have to interact with people. For example, the role-play stuff I do on Second Life is an attempt to have some controlled interaction with people. And from behind the safety of a character it does help a bit, but if I stop for any length of time it can be a Herculean effort to force myself back into it again.

This is one of the big reasons I became so good with computers I think, and why I’ve stuck to programming or systems engineering for the last 40 years; I.T. isn’t a ‘client facing’ position, so I’m left to work my arcane spells and build my mad science experiments in some darkened back room where no one goes.

Leave me be, slide a pizza under the door on occasion, and I’ll continue to make the magic that keeps the doors open and the money coming in.

Unfortunately my sales director has never caught on to this, so a few times per year I’m forced to interact with a client for some impossible engagement, and clients can get confrontational — and that never works out well.

See, when I’m forced into a confrontation with people, my entire goal becomes getting out of the situation as expediently as possible… So I’ll acquiesce to damn near anything as long as it means I can get away — and this is generally bad for sales.

Take my current client; I’m a few hours over on the contract, but I don’t really care because I just want to make them happy so they will go away… Sales on the other hand does care because that’s money being left on the table. So the sales director gets irked, I get irked, the client gets irked, and no one ends up happy…

But the sales director gets his commission; so he’ll put me back in this position in 60-90 days, as always, and it will all repeat.

I’ve jokingly mentioned many times that the only way out of this loop is to fail in such a fashion that he doesn’t make commission off of the project… The problem is I’m not good at failure either, and will put in 60+ hour weeks while no one is looking to ensure I don’t fail.

This time though, things have aligned so poorly and I’ve been hung so far out to dry by the lack of people around the office because of zombies, that I think failure is inevitable — so there might be a light at the end of the tunnel…

I started moving over to the new house on Sunday, and moved some of my more fragile items like framed art and whatnot this evening after work.

While doing this I took a moment to appreciate the view from my front porch…

My W2 arrived, so that means it’s time to break out the calculator and get to doing my taxes…

Fortunately I have one of those new-fangled electronic adding machines…

Funny aside, I’ve had one of this family of Casios on or near my desk for decades. They have huge VFD displays that are easy on the eyes, really pleasant keys, and they run on mains power which gives them a satisfyingly analog 60hz hum when plugged in.

If you’re using some fiddly LCD pocket calculator more than 2-3 times a week, seriously — do yourself a favor and drop the $30 on an old-school desktop calculator. 🙂

I managed to get ahold of a utility to create watch faces for the Apple Watch, and while installation is a giant PITA, once it’s working it’s pretty keen.

Being a fan of ‘old stuff’, my first modification of the Apple Watch was, of course, to turn it into an old-school 80’s LED watch.

What’s interesting is that the Apple Watch is OLED, so the less it displays the less power it uses and longer the battery lasts. With the combination of turning on the ‘raise to view’ in the series-6 watch, and this mock-LED setup using so little screen, the battery in the watch lasts days now.

Other than that, I’m still involved with the client I’ve been dealing with for a couple of months now — but I think there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

It’s not that these folks are a bad client… It’s more that I have generally plenty of balls in the air at work, and sales adding more things for me to juggle causes excessive complexity for little to no profit.

See, when sales gets one of these ‘technically tricky’ projects on the hook and decides to drop it on my plate, lots of other things needing my attention start to pile up. So, while the company gets to bill me out at a couple hundred an hour, the things not getting done wind up costing a couple hundred an hour.

So it’s usually a wash for the company — but sales gets a commission, so they keep doing it.

Oh well.

During my walk last night I wandered past the local theater and noticed they were open once again — so that became my adventure for the evening.

Over the last year my local theater has alternated between completely closed and various states of open many times. How long they will be open this time, no one can say, but either way I braved certain infectious doom and saw “Monster Hunter” last night.

It was a fun romp, and better than I expected for a video game turned movie.

Granted, it’s still a Chinese-funded compu-fu live-action cartoon with a plot that fits on a napkin — if you write really big. But it was still a good excuse to get out of the house and eat $20 worth of popcorn and soda — if you’re not super worried about contracting the plague du jour, of course.

As for the aforementioned certain infectious doom, I’ve essentially come to the conclusion that the level of virus panic scales with how politically expedient said panic is at the moment — but that’s just me.

I mean the incongruency of the warnings, and the rules related to those warnings, is enough to give you a headache… For example right now, depending on who is standing behind the microphone, you need need to be wearing a mask:

• constantly
• only if you leave your house
• as soon as you get out of your car
• only if you’re amidst a group of people
• only if you enter a public building
• only between the door and the table at a restaurant
• only if you’re not actively eating or drinking

The best I can figure, COVID-19 is the most intelligent virus on Earth because its so damn picky about how and where it does its thing… Like, some places have a curfew where everyone has to be home by some arbitrary time in the evening, because COVID-19 only comes out at night — or something.

And now we have plague 2.0 here in Colorado, which apparently came from the UK even though the UK has been completely locked down for months. Oh, and the guy who allegedly caught it has no record of travel…

Score one for locking down entire countries I guess.

As for me, as one would expect I fall somewhere in the middle when it comes to masks; I have one that I purchased almost a year ago — a washable, reusable one commonly used by dirt bikers and ATV riders under their helmet. 

I carry it in the car or in breast pocket of my jacket, and put in on before walking into a store, restaurant, or other public space — and take it off the instant I hit the outside air again. I don’t wear it at the office because there are literally 6 people in the entire three story 100,000 square foot building right now. And the world is a big place for an 80nm virus, so I’m not too worried about encountering it in the wild — so I don’t mask up when I’m outside either.

So far, so good — I’ve not come down with any signs of zombification. 🙂

In general, all word processors are the same; you type, words show up on the screen, some of them might even be spelled right, and if you’re lucky the grammar checker wasn’t written using RPN.

The tricky part is when you go to save all of that furious typing… Because the only real money-maker left in the word processing world is how proprietary you can make your file format while still making it relevant enough to warrant people paying you for your product.

That said, I just paid a $99 “subscription” for Microsoft Office for my M1 MacBook Air — for a file format.

See, I’m working on a report for a client, and while I can happily use the built-in didn’t-pay-a-dime-for-it “Pages” and “Numbers” that came in MacOS to actually create this report — and I did — those aren’t actual Microsoft Office…

Pages, to its credit, can actually export your work into a DOCX file, but this won’t really be an upper-case-W ‘Word’ document… So things will get a bit strange when you open it in actual Microsoft Office.

And this simply doesn’t fly when writing a client-facing report.

Anyway, the process of cutting and pasting between Pages and Word was pretty painless, and it only took a few minutes to convince Word to stop helping and to do things my way.

Which is the real reason I don’t use Word; it’s typical Microsoft in that it tries to be all things to all people — which dramatically over complicates the thing and makes it a chore to use. Every time I need to use Word, there’s an inevitable stop in productivity as I page through 1×10^32 functions to find some basic thing like search-replace…

I need an app simply lets me save stuff I type with some optional formatting flair — not a desktop publishing suite with more nested options and cryptic menus than the Burj Khalifa has floors.

This morning is one of those mornings where you can actually see the shadow of the horizon slowly pan down the mountains and across Denver from the roof of my office.

With all the flop and twitch going on in the world I took the hint back in March and, over a few months, amassed some supplies in case things got truly out of whack. And ultimately I ended up with probably a month of dried or canned goods, a half-dozen cases of bottled water, and extra basic essentials. All of which I’m rotating through to maintain shelf-life.

Again, not that I’m a ‘prepper’ by any stretch of the imagination, it just seemed prudent to at least have a plan and some supplies in the event of an emergency. I mean, just because nothing really bad ever happens in Colorado — no earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes, plagues of locusts, etc. — doesn’t mean that everything will be rainbows and butterflies all the time.

Anyway, in the process of acquiring these supplies I’ve sampled quite a few ‘shelf stable emergency rations’ over the last few months — and in general while they will keep you alive, let’s just say you don’t really look forward to one as a meal.

On the other end of the spectrum are MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) — military rations. As former military myself, I’ve eaten quite a few those brown bags over the years and they tend to be pretty good, as one would expect for a trillion dollar enterprise like the military. They’re also kind of tricky to get as the military doesn’t exactly sell them. And when you can get them, typically from a company that makes them for the above mentioned trillion dollar enterprise, they’re kinda expensive for what you get.

And this started me on the path to determining what I thought to be the best shelf-stable food I could find.

Enter “Mountain House”.

Mountain House is the retail arm of Oregon Freeze Dry, a company specializing in, well, freeze drying stuff. They also don’t actually make ‘survival rations’ and instead market their meals as stuff for backpackers, hikers, and other folks looking for meals that are light weight, easy to make, calorically balanced, and rugged enough to handle trail-time.

The difference between ‘preppers’ and ‘hikers’ is the former will literally eat bark, gravel, and pinecones to stay alive. While the latter has certain parameters to meet, but can afford to be picky and seek out stuff that at least tastes good.

So I acquired a sampler of Mountain House meals — and they’re pretty amazing.

This morning, for example, I’m having one of my ‘comfort foods’; Biscuits and Gravy.

To prepare this you open it, remove the desiccant, add a cup and a half of boiling water, stir, seal, wait, and then eat.

Interestingly, this ‘trail ration’ actually tastes better than some restaurants I go to, and the only real noticeable difference is texture. Actual biscuits and gravy is a couple of biscuits, some breakfast sausage (usually a patty), and white gravy.

The Mountain House version is the same thing, but if you took your knife and fork and cut it all up into chunks, and then stirred it all together. And somehow Mountain house managed to retain the biscuit texture. I expected water-reconstituted biscuit to be nothing but mush — but nope… Sorcery I tell ya.

So a different texture, but actually pretty delicious.

These meals are also basically good forever; check out the best by date:

November 2050… I’m not even sure my best by date is that far in the future. 🙂

These do tend to be a bit heavy on the salt, which is probably okay if your goal is to make it to the top of a 14’er today. But for people like me who will be flying an LMD (low mahogany desk) for 8-10 hours today, it’s a bit steep.

I’ll just make sure that lunch and dinner are as salt-free as possible. 

Today I got to see the place my CFO is offering, and it’s really nice.

It’s probably twice the space I have now, with a really upscale layout and killer views that overlook Cherry Creek park and show off the mountains. The front door opens to a nature preserve with trees, streams, and critters, and walking paths and foot bridges that run throughout it. Oh, and a bigger garage, a gas range, and a full basement where I can put my extra ‘stuff’ and a treadmill for when the weather gets bad.

Overall, it’s a $450,000 place in a nice neighborhood with lots of amenities. And I pulled the trigger today and said I’d take it.

My bedroom will be on the west side of the house, on the second floor, and the windows all face the forest and mountains and those epic Colorado sunsets. It’s also two rooms on that end of the house, so I’ll have a room for my desk and computer stuff, and one right next door for when I pass out. Oh, and about a hundred square feet of closet space…

So, this meant this evening I had to give the current place their 60-day notice that I’m not renewing, which I did – and that’s always a bit like leaping into the abyss. I trust that things will work out, but there’s always that slim chance things will go pear-shaped and I’ll need to hustle to compensate and put a roof back over my head in a hurry.

Not that I can’t just pay whatever extortion is required to get a 2-3 bedroom apartment at the drop of a hat, it’s more the rushed moving and whatnot.

Anyway, now it’s just a matter of waiting a month to move again.

Luckily my CFO doesn’t ask me for deposits or anything, and I’ll be surprised if there’s even a lease… I’ve rented from him a few times over the last 16 years, so he knows I’m good for the payments and that I won’t tear the place up. And he knows how long I’ve worked where I work, how much I make, and how instrumental I am to keeping the doors open. 🙂

Ultimately it will work out to a hundred less than my current townhouse per month, but the utilities will more than likely eat up that savings. So cost-wise it’s a wash, but space, location, and amenity-wise it’s a nice step in the right direction.

And, if after a few years I decide I really like it I can buy it from him. And I’m sure I’ll get a square deal if I do that.

So, we’ll see how it goes.

Welp, we made it.

As is tradition, I was asleep by about 10pm and missed all of the drunken frivolity and fireworks.

Today is a day off, so after my breakfast and morning walk I’ll start in on the great yearly password reset.

I’m not exactly a super political person, but given current events a lot of this entry will probably be somewhat political in nature. Just a head’s up…

The second “COVID stimulus” check arrived in my bank account this morning…

For a couple of weeks now the folks in D.C. have been arguing over how much everyone should get as an attempt to ‘help them out’ because of COVID, and I guess they settled on $600.

It was hard to say how much the stimulus check would be until it showed up, as the “Covid Aid Bill” responsible for these payments was part of something like 5500 pages of spending for everything else congress could possibly think of, as usual. And everyone in congress got about two hours to review said 5500 pages before having to vote on it. Also as usual.

For an example of what goes on in the thousands of pages beyond the first ten: “Of the funds appropriated under title III of the Act that are made available for assistance for Pakistan, not less than $15,000,000 shall be made available for democracy programs and not less than $10,000,000 shall be made available for gender programs.” 

Yep. $10 million. Of your money. For gender programs. In Pakistan.

Then there’s funds for a “Resource Study of the Springfield (Illinois) Race Riot.” That riot occurred in 1908 by the way. 

Typical stuff for Congress; find something We The People need, and then tack on a few thousand pages of pet projects, lobbyist ideas, donor suggestions, or whatever else they can dream up knowing we’ll pay for it because we need the first ten pages and we don’t really have a choice…

It’s basically a hostage situation.

Anyway, these stimulus payments inversely scale with how much you make, and I make too much to really get anything out of them. With this one I’ll get a ‘free’ lunch at Taco Bell, for example. 

I suppose that’s okay in the long run, and the trillions of dollars are, in theory, going to those who really need it. I know this isn’t the case and everyone but me is gaming the system in some way — but I like the illusion of compassion so don’t ruin it for me.

For the first time in forever, I’m not doing new year’s resolutions this year… Things are just too up-in-the-air in the world and I don’t want to be obligated to a resolution that becomes nigh impossible because of events beyond my control.

And let’s face it, everything is beyond my control at this point… We don’t even know who the president is yet because of the circus surrounding the vote…

On that, the thing I really just don’t get is if nothing bad happened and nothing is amiss — why the fight to prevent anyone from proving it? We are constantly told that nothing unusual happened during the election (disregarding the mathematical anomalies, weird video footage of people doing sketchy things while no one was looking, polling places actively preventing observation, and suspect ballot printing), but as soon as anyone with enough clout to force them to prove it tries to prove it, it heads to the courts.

It’s like if someone says they aced a math exam without using a calculator, but as soon as someone else asks to see the grade or to see their work, that person is sued and taken to court in order to not have to show anything.

Just seems suspect I guess.

Anyway, because of 2020, and most likely 2021, I’m adding two years to my ten-year plan. Again, circumstances beyond my control pretty much halted me for an entire year. And I’m sure it’s going to take me some time to extract the pandemic wrench from my life plans even if things get back to ‘normal’ in Q1 ’21.

The holiday season is inextricably tied to toys, and even here in my 50’s I still look forward to buying myself some small totally-useless-but-ultimately-fun item each year.

Now, I’m not talking about things that are actually useful or needed, those are always good presents, but they’re more than likely not a toy. What I refer to here is something purchased simply to have fun with and enjoy for no particular reason.

In recent years, for me at least, this has usually been some oddball thing I really, really, really wanted as a kid but never got for whatever reason, or some random trophy from bygone days. This year it was the Powerbook G4, for example; totally useless, but I love having it as a memento and it’s fun to fiddle with.

I tend to think this is what separates child-like Christmas Joy from more adult Holiday Obligation… So I endeavor to keep my inner-child active and healthy with some pointlessly fun thing each year.

This theory came about back when I was in the Navy and living through that transition from child to adult that most of us go through… The transition from getting up super early on Christmas morning to see what new thing(s) you got to play with, to trying desperately to sleep in on Christmas morning because it might actually be a day off if you played your cards right.

I realized a few years after I’d gotten out of the Navy that I’d become my father; bah humbug xmess is just an expensive waste of time if you need me I’ll be at work… And I needed to not do that, even if I was generally alone every holiday season. 

So, I try to get myself something pointlessly fun each year to keep the holiday alive.

Over the years this has gone from something small like a literal $5 toy when I wasn’t making very much, to more recent commissioned bits of art for a character or picking up some antique doodad that I always wanted as a kid but never got.

I have a few things on the list that I may or may not get to over the years; like an Edmund Scientific “Astroscan”…

Another thing on the list is a Parker Brothers “Merlin”…

I had a friend who had a Merlin, and in the early 80’s it was truly a “magical device” as Apple would say.

I think I’m going to start a new series here in ye olde journal where I detail some strange, interesting, or strangely interesting facet of growing up in the 70’s and 80’s.

I mean; I was there, man!

For example, you’ve probably used the term “Generic” before, but did you know that back in the early 80’s generic was such a big deal there was literally a “Generic Store”?

I’m not kidding; an actual store full of nothing but plain white wrapper stuff with block-print stating what it ostensibly was. Even the store’s sign was in this style, and simply said “Generic Store”.

The ‘Generic’ age came right before the dawn of the ‘Store Brands’ era which we live in now. Back in the late 70’s, early 80’s most stores had a Generic aisle full of not-quite-up-to-snuff stuff placed into plain white packaging and sold at a discount, and it was just a matter of time before someone made a free-standing store out of the idea…

My mother shopped at the Generic Store quite a bit.

See, my mom tended to treat grocery shopping like a personal conquest to try and squeeze every penny until it screamed. She would spend each weekend clipping coupons, and spent about a week before every monthly grocery run planning meals around whatever coupons she had acquired, and woe be unto the grocery store that offered things like ‘double coupons’…

It often took just as long for the person at the register to go through all of the coupons as it did to ring up all of the groceries, and if mom was on her game she’d drop the cost from around $50 to $30 or less… And, being the 80’s, $50 would literally fill the back of mom’s Opel 1900 wagon, seats to tailgate.

But all of this frugal had its own cost… I ate a lot of garlic butter baked cod, spaghetti, kielbasa and potatoes, hot dogs in stuff (mac-n-cheese, baked beans, etc), sloppy joes, quiche… Anything that could be made cheaply, in bulk, and kept well in Tupperware.

So, mom and the Generic Store had a bit of an illicit affair for a while, and I remember making a few trips to the unhappiest place on earth… The store was dimly lit, filled with gray colorless boxes, tins, and cans, and full of slow moving old people in shades of ash.

Walking into the store was like walking into a black and white TV.

Fortunately the Generic Store was fairly short-lived. I seem to recall it only being around for a year or two in fact.

Another Generic thing that happened at about the same time, though at the other end of Longmont, was “The Hamburger Stand”.

The building was white and black, the packaging was white and black, the employee uniforms were white and black, and most of the stuff on the menu was $0.39. Burger? 39 cents. Fries? 39 cents. Drink? 39 cents…

There was other stuff on the menu, like a 49 cent cheeseburger or corndog, but no one bought the expensive stuff.

About once a year my father would head over to the Hamburger Stand and buy like $20 worth, bring them home in several sacks, and we’d eat cheap burgers for far too long. But it was only once a year, so it was still a treat. 🙂

If I squint, I can see 2021 sitting there at the end of the week.

2020 has been  — interesting, but I’ll not be overly upset to put it behind me.

While the marking of the calendar most certainly won’t actually change anything, from a psychological point of view it’s a fixed point in time that heralds a turn of the page and the start of a new chapter.

And I think a great many people can use that right now.

I’m pretty sure everyone has heard, ad nauseam, about all of the problems that rode along with 2020, but I prefer to look back at the good stuff…

I moved, which seems to happen every two or three years, so that in and of itself isn’t exceptionally news-worthy. But this time I managed to time the move into a brand new never-been-lived-in place right as the zombie apocalypse happened. So, during the subsequent lockdown I’ve had a new place to get to know and a really nice place to hole up until it blows over.

I acquired a Vespa and rode it around for a few months, which was ridiculously fun and really got me wanting another motorcycle. Once the plague subsides and things even out (glass half-full), I’ll go get my “M” endorsement for my license just in case the opportunity for a motorcycle arrises.

I’m better prepared for things now. With the riots, looting, arson, supply chain problems, lockdowns, and people generally not being bolted together very well these days — I got my poop in a group in case everything goes truly pear-shaped.

Having a plan is most of the battle… For example, at work I had a plan for everyone to be working from home long before the zombie apocalypse, so the transition into the lockdown was fairly instant and really painless for everyone. And due to this we’ve not had to lay anyone off throughout this lunacy. In fact, company-wise we’re on track to have a slightly better year than last year.

Other than that I picked up some new computers this year; iMac and M1 MacBook Air which are both pretty incredible; living in the future ain’t half bad! Oh, and an old-new computer — the Powerbook G4, which still manages to be better than most of what’s out there.

Speaking of computers, I will soon start the great password migration; my yearly systematic update of every login and password for everything that has a login and password. And, being so involved online and requiring that everything has a unique, complex login and password, means it’s an all-day event.

Simply to get out of the house for a bit and get some fresh air and sunshine, the roommate and I drove down to the Waffle House in Castle Rock for breakfast.

The reason for the 20 mile trek was that of all the Waffle Houses in the area, the guy who runs the one in Castle Rock has outdoor seating — which complies with the zombie mandates.

He’s also just a really nice guy and good fun to chat with, and we’re doing our part to keep a local business open.

Anyway, as we pulled up another customer did as well; a car with Texas plates. The driver rolled down his window and asked if they were open…

I had to stifle an immediate chuckle, and answered that they were but the seating was all outside.

See, the driver of the car from Texas was the spitting image in both look and voice as “Skank” from the movie “The Crow”… I mean, identical. I briefly thought it might actually be the actor behind the character.

This fellow and his wife took a table nearby and while she was inside ordering we all got to talking (as people still do, even with zombies). Turns out as we talked about zombies and whatnot that he was just your average rando from Texas, but it was still really interesting to have a discussion with “Skank” at a Waffle House in Castle Rock. 😀

Back in the 70’s the holidays were ruled by catalog showrooms like Sears, Montgomery Wards, and the big-dog around my house — Service Merchandise.

The ritual was to make note of when the catalogs arrived, which was pretty easy as they were the size of phonebooks, and then wait for mom to finish with them. Once the catalogs moved from the top of the coffee table to the shelf under it — it was game-on. See, mom would spend a few days looking through them and circling things with her customary red pen. Once she was done, I got my turn to ‘wish-list’ with whatever blue/black ballpoint was handy.

The trick here was to play the economics of Christmas. See, our father had fairly tight purse strings when it came to us kids, and we knew that the budget was somewhere in the $30-$50 range ($100-$150 in 2020), per kid, for presents. And when you’re a kid faced with a hundred pages of toys and you want to both get lots of stuff, but also that one “coolest thing ever!” you saw on TV, and you have around $40 to do it with — you can agonize over the catalogs for a solid week.

Our 70’s holidays were also supplemented by the yearly Christmas party put on by my father’s employer. It was held at the BPO Elks Lodge in Boulder the weekend before Christmas, and the company really did it up; bought fairly up-scale gifts for all of the kids, had a “Santa” on hand to give them out, catered a really nice meal for all of the families, and then gave every employee a turkey or ham for their Christmas dinner.

My sister and I had something of a silent competition when it came to gifts — seeing which of us would get the bigger ticket items. But when the 80’s rolled around I had an unfair advantage when it came to the Gift Wars as I was big into computers — as was my father. So it was slightly easier to score some expensive computational doohickey simply because my father would be interested in playing with it too.

But by the 80’s I was also in my teens, in junior/senior high, and Christmas was taking a back seat to hanging out with friends anywhere but home. This also meant my sister, being seven years my younger, was taking the family focus — so I guess it worked out for both of us.

Christmas also included my grandparents, and my Grandfather seemed to delight in antagonizing my overly protective mother with his unique brand of gifts…

In ’81 I got I got a six-inch stag handled Bowie knife with a tooled leather scabbard. I was 12 at the time, which in PawPaw’s opinion was the transition age to cigars and whiskey.

My father took possession of the knife and I never saw it again after that Christmas.

The next year, 1982, I got a rifle from my Grandfather; a .22 LR lever gun. I never got the chance to even touch that present, though it did hang above the mantle (with a trigger lock on it) through ’86 when I left for the Navy.

I think after the rifle every present my Grandfather sent was pre-screened before being put under the tree.

One gift I got from PawPaw before his passing is a 1971 Eisenhower silver dollar — and I still have it.

I remember him handing it to me and saying, “As long as you have this, you’re not broke.”

He wasn’t wrong. 🙂