Central Coast Senior

3 years, I can’t believe I’ve been away from this that long. While I would love to blame this on being too busy, or suffering some horrible injury, the truth is I just didn’t think about it. Which looking back seems pretty careless of me.

So let’s see, where to begin. Like most people there is good news and bad news. Fortunately the good news far exceeds the bad news. So let’s get the bad out of the way first. Top of that list is my sister Bobbi passed away this year. She was probably among the kindest people I know and also the luckiest. I will talk more about her in a separate post.

I had previously been diagnosed with AFIB and had a cardiac ablation in 2021, which seems to help. Boy, I just wish I could cut back on all the meds I have to take. Although I shouldn’t complain, they are keeping me around so I can enjoy my grandkids.

Which leads me to the good news, I currently have 2 additions to the grandkid lists William and Evelina. William was born in January 2021 and Evelina in August 2022. They both are amazing kids and a joy to be around. To make this even better news our youngest daughter and family moved from San Diego to San Luis Obispo. While it was going to happen eventually, the fact that they moved up here in 2021 was awesome. Who would have thought one could be happy for a rental property to be infested with rats? Which is another story for another time.

hopefully I can do a better job of posting from this point forward. But only time will tell…

Today is the 19th anniversary of the horrendous attack on the US. I am sure many have memories of where they were and what they experienced on that fateful day. This is my experience.

In March of 2001 I had become the product manager for the upgrade of some of the Early Warning Radars to support the Groundbased Missile Defense program. My teams job was to oversee the Raytheon subcontract to be sure we were delivering to the government a working system. As such we were required to provide briefings to the government on various aspects of the progress.

So on September 10th, we flew to Washington D.C. to Washington Reagan airport in preparation for a meeting that was scheduled to start the next day. The next day, in the late afternoon, I was scheduled to fly to Colorado Springs from the same airport.

So the day started normally, just like many others when I traveled. I woke up, cleaned myself up, had breakfast in the concierge lounge, grabbed my bag, and then checked out of my hotel, the Crystal City Marriott, before heading to work.

The meeting started at promptly at 8:00 am and after the preliminaries we were the first group up. I had my lead systems engineer giving a briefing. He had gotten no more than 5 minutes into the briefing when the government lead raised his hand and announced that we had to pause the meeting for a moment while they conferred with the program office. a few minutes later he came back in to tell us that a plane had struck the one of the World Trade Center towers and they were awaiting further guidance. It was just minutes later that he came back in and told us the meeting was cancelled as a second plane had struck the second tower.

Needless to say we were all shook and also a little confused regarding what the plans were going forward. After a bit we heard that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. This was truly disturbing as we were only a metro stop away from the Pentagon.

I became worried about my boss, who had gone to the Pentagon for a classified meeting on another program. I was later to find out that his meeting had been in the Annex a mile from the crash site. He had his meeting cancelled when they came into the room announced the attack and then told everyone in the room, both government and civilian, were being drafted to help search for survivors. Sam was only at the site for a moment before all civilians were directed to leave as they now had sufficient help for the search and rescue efforts. So Sam just headed back to our offices where I was located.

After our meeting ended all we could do was find tv’s and watch in shock as the towers came down, hearing about the Pennsylvania crash, and all the images of the destruction everywhere. While we were watching, we all began to try and call home. It took several attempts as the cell towers were overloaded. I finally got through to my wife letting her know I was alright. By the time I got through to her, she had already heard about the attacks through our oldest daughter.

By this time they had grounded all aircraft for the foreseeable future which meant I was stuck in DC with no place to stay. So I decided to head back to the Marriott to see if I could get a room.

Entering the subway station was like entering a different world this time. You could smell the smoke and see the haze from the Pentagon crash and everyone around me looked to be in a daze. When I exited the subway at the Crystal City stop, the first thing I noticed was all the pilots and other people that were just standing around trying to figure out what they were going to do. The smell here was just as bad.

I went into the hotel and the front desk was pure chaos. I could see that I wasn’t the only one needing to find a room. So when it got to be my turn at the front desk, I tried to get a room and was denied. From their explanation I could tell that they were still confused just as much as the rest of us and the full import of what had occurred hadn’t settled in yet. Their reason for not giving me a room was that they were full as they had several people scheduled to check in that day. So I tried to get on the waiting list and was told no they already had too many people on the list. Oh-oh looks like I could have a problem.

So I did the only thing I could think of at the time, I went back to work where I ran into my boss. I described my problem to him and he took me back to the hotel and let me store my stuff in his room with an understanding that if worse came to worse I could stay in his room as he had 2 queen sized beds. While we were in his room we turned on the tv to follow the story as it unfolded. While there I looked out the window, as his room overlooked the Richmond Highway. It was bumper to bumper traffic as everyone tried to get out of the city and back home. After several hours we decided to go downstairs to see if things had changed. Before leaving the room I looked out the window a second time and the Hwy was deserted. Not a single car and during my time looking out the window not a single car came by. It was eerie.

Downstairs Sam had made friends with one of the front desk people and chose her to talk to in order to see if we could get a room for me. It was interesting to watch the exchange. When we first made the request for a room, she told us no. Sam kept talking to her, describing the situation and eventually she said she would add me to the list, but she couldn’t promise anything. Sam talked to her a little longer and Bingo! She checked me back into my old room, which I am sure made Sam very happy.

Going out into the subway a little later, I was shocked again. The subway was deserted now, just like the Hwy, all those people standing around earlier were all gone and the haze was gone as well. Unfortunately the smell was still noticeable.

So next thing I needed to do was to get a flight home. This was another strange experience. Beginning on the evening of 11th, I got a phone call from Boeing Travel that they had booked me on a flight out of Washington Reagan for the following morning. Every morning the flights were cancelled.This went on for days.

On the 12th I went back to the Boeing offices as I thought it would be better to work around other people. My heart broke when I climbed into the elevator and saw that the picture of a man that had worked somewhere else in the office building had been on one of the planes out of Boston. And then on top of that, one of the engineers for one of our other Raytheon teams stopped to talk to me because he was really shook up. It turned out that one of the planes that had been hijacked in Boston was the plane that he always took when he flew home. So if we hadn’t had that meeting in DC he could have potentially been on that flight that day.

The effort to get home continued for several days. Finally on Wednesday night several of us had decided we had been in DC long enough. It was time to drive home. So I called one of the office administrators (OA) and asked her to reserve us a minivan for the drive home. As flights had just begun to start up at some airports, I also gave her our route and asked her to check airports along our route, just in case we could stop somewhere and get home a little quicker. So we planned to leave at 8:00 am the next morning. That night one of the group had managed to get himself on a Delta flight out of Dulles Airport, through Atlanta, to fly home to LAX. So he was dropping out of the drive.

Thursday morning came and the 3 of us remaining went and picked up our minivan and headed out. About 2 hours into our drive I got a call from my OA telling us she was able to book on a flight from Pittsburgh, through St. Louis to LAX. We were ecstatic and headed to the Pittsburgh airport. We got there, turned our van in and then proceeded to wait around for what was supposed to be a several hour wait.

While standing around we noticed that there was a direct flight scheduled to leave in the next 2 hours that was direct from Pittsburgh to LAX, so I told everyone to go get in line for that Southwest flight while I called my OA. I told her to book us on that flight if possible and quickly as we were already in line to check in. The line moved slowly and I was beginning to worry that we were going to have to get out of line. But just before we became the next group to walk up to the counter, I got the notice that we were booked and on the flight.

So we got our tickets and went to the gate to wait, and wait, and wait. The flight was getting delayed as they were still trying to round up a crew to man the flight. While we were waiting we decided to go get something to eat and ended up at place that served big New York style pizza. One of the guys asked for a knife and fork to eat his pizza and was informed that the airport had directed that they could no longer issue any silverware to customers.

Finally we were able to board our flight for our journey home. Like normal the pilot went through his preflight speech. But this time was different, as he acknowledged that these were difficult times we still needed to listen to the flight attendants and obey the rules. He ended his little speech with:

“basically this means we won’t take any crap off anyone”.

The other passengers and I all applauded. Funny thing was, that during meal service they brought everyone their tray and I couldn’t help but remember our experience with the pizza as I unrolled my napkin. After it was unrolled, I couldn’t believe my eyes, whereas the pizza shop couldn’t give us anything, the airlines gave a full set of steel silverware!

Now 19 years later, I find that the experience still affects me on this day. Thinking how so many innocent lives were destroyed and so many other lives were turned upside down that day. This morning while reading about some of the memorials I cried and prayed that nothing like this ever happens to anyone again.

After writing about my missed chance to become a billionaire I began thinking about how computers have been a big part of my life. Now that they are so ubiquitous, after all the phone in ones hand today has more memory, storage, and processing power than the computers I started with. I thought a little reminiscing would be fun.

The first computer I ever had was the Commodore Pet with expanded memory, all 8K of it. I loved that machine, it came out in 1977 and now lives in my garage, I can’t seem to part with it.

Besides the expanded memory I also splurged for the additional mass storage device, a second cassette recorder. I practiced my BASIC programming skills on this and when I moved out to an apartment my roommate who Helen always referred to as “Chair” owned a TRS-80 (or as I called the Trash-80) from Radio Shack.

So of course we had to have a computer challenge, and since I was the better coder I wrote a program that would fill the screens in a spiral, which we put on both computers and then started at the same time. While the Commodore Pet seemed to win more than lose, overall the 2 computers seemed to be pretty comparable.

It was also during this time I joined the OCCC – Orange County Computer Club. This was a fascinating time as that during this period I began investigating building my own computer, because the only way to get a ‘real’ computer was to build it yourself. I subscribed to the Dr. Dobbs Journal, the bible for all computer enthusiast at the time. Unfortunately my job at Computer Automation didn’t pay enough for me to actually build my own computer, but I sure had lots of fun browsing through all the hardware.

One day when visiting my folks I saw that my dad had a computer in his office, it was the Texas Instrument TI-99/4, this was soon to become my favorite early computer. This thing was expandable through a slot on the side, the problem being that all the expansion was spread out across your desk as every peripheral plugged into the side so you ended up with something that looked like this:

Later they released an update that used a cabinet so that it no longer filled your desk and it looked like this:

I was so crazy about the one that when TI announced they were cancelling the TI-99/4a I dragged Helen to all the JC Penney’s stores in the area trying to buy as many of them as possible for about $50 apiece, I ended up with 2.

I unfortunately, well actually fortunately, because by this time we already had our 1st daughter and I had way more fun holding her that any computer could provide.

It wasn’t until around 1984-85 that I was finally able to buy a computer. So my first computer was and IBM PC/AT clone that I bought at the Computer Swap Meet at the Fairgrounds in Pomona, my new favorite playground.

This was the first computer that i spent lots of time using. Prior to this computer everything I did was standalone, it was offline only because online didn’t exist yet. With this machine though I went online in 1985 or what passed for online then and joined Compuserve, Delphi, & Prodigy. This was mostly for message boards. My favorite was on Prodigy, a Robert A. Heinlein board where we discussed his novels.

While this was going on at home things were changing at work. In 1983 I went to work for Northrop on the B2 program, there, the team I was on wanted find a way to make use of desktop computers to track our work. So my boss gave me permission to buy the first Personal Computer for our department and maybe for the whole program. The machine was an Apple Lisa. Until that time all I ever saw in the building were word processing machines from Wang at the secretaries desk. I had hoped to find a way to tie in what I was doing on the Artemis system, a project planning/networking product, with the Apple to produce meaningful information.

From this job I moved upstairs to join the program planning team and ended up buying the first computers for that department. This time I bought Texas Instrument Professional Computer (TIPC) machines and used them to develop a database program for managing change orders. In doing the database I ended up having to learn DB IV a database program.

From there I went to McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach where I used an IBM PC. I did database and other types of programming on this for my organization. The thing I remember most was my morning routine. When I made it in to work, I would first walk over to the PC and turn it on. I would then go get a cup of coffee, chat with a few people for a few minutes and then head back to the machine. By this time, if i had timed it right I only had a few seconds to wait for the menu to pop up.

When I transferred to McDonnell Douglas in Huntington Beach they were using PCs. After about 2 years they decided to switch to the Macintosh SE.

This was interesting as the entire support staff were new to Apple computers and really didn’t know how to maintain them. So I did for our group. One day the support staff came through the area to upgrade the memory on the Macs from 1 Mb to a whopping 4Mb. So they came in snapped the new modules in and then left. Unfortunately to use the full 4MB you also needed to make a change to the system to recognize the memory. So I basically had to follow them to fix every machine in our department. This was also the first computer I ever actually was able to explore the internet. The experiments with Mac SE’s lasted about 2 years before they switched back to PCs.

Meanwhile at home I would occasionally upgrade to better and faster computers. When laptops came out, I of course jumped on to that and bought not only myself one, but bought one for Helen. I didn’t realize how carried away I was in buying computers until we sold our last house in Moreno Valley for a move to Pismo Beach. As part of our packing I decided to get rid of any old computers I had laying around and recycle them. So I went and put them in the back of my truck. I was shocked with what I ended up loading up.

Of course I pulled the hard drives to destroy and it was interesting to see how they had changed over the years.

In the above picture the amount of storage on the drive goes from the smallest amount on the left to the most storage on the right.

Since then I have mostly focused on using various forms of laptops. I now currently own:

1 – mid-2012 Macbook Pro (upgraded HD and Ram

1 – Microsoft Surface Book

1 – Microsoft Surface tablet

1 – Dell 27″ Inspiron all-in-one

4 – iPads

1 – Kindle Fire tablet

3 – Kindle

And don”t get me started on the number of phones laying around the house….

When I started planning this trip I was looking for apps that would help me with either planning or executing my trip. In the Apple App Store I came across an app called Polarsteps. A travel blogging app that manages your photos and helps you to create a travel blog in pictures of places you have been. I have been using the app for the first time on this Road Trip and I absolutely love it. The only downside is that it currently is for the IPhone only and they don't recommend running it on multiple devices under the same account.

When you first install the app it goes through your photo library and tries to build trips based on your photos. It does a reasonable job, but sometimes it gets confused simply because we all save photos from friends and family we get during our travels and the app thinks they are part of the trip (which I guess in one sense they really are)
After it's done you can go through edit and delete those that you don't want. I personally just would delete some of the trips that I decided would be too much effort to fix. But overall I was pleasantly surprised at the job it did.

I then preprogrammed my next Road Trip so that on the at day it started I could just open that trip and start clicking away. I found that the app was ridiculously easy to use and in fact fun. I found myself taking extra photos just so I could catalogue my route better as I drove. For me it's a joy to see where I have been with the map that displays where you took your photo.

So if you are thinking of traveling and want an easy way to share photos this is much nicer than Facebook.

Well I certainly couldn’t ask for a better way to wrap up September. Our newest grandchild joined the family on the evening of September 30th. Aria Elenitsa Medina was born weighing in at 10 lbs 6.6 oz, 21 inches long, and of course absolutely beautiful! She also let her mom know that she plans to be a handful.

Eileen went into the hospital around 5:30 in the morning and Aria didn’t arrive until after 7 that night! I of course followed the progress via text messages as I was busy doing my favorite thing. Babysitting!! Sophia and I hung out for the day and were joined in the afternoon by Elliana which allowed all the ladies to spend the day with Eileen in the delivery room, which I know she appreciated.

As for me and the grandkids we had a blast, playing ring around the roses, climbing into their fort (under the outdoor dining table) and just generally running around. While I did have a ball, those little girls ran me ragged. By the time that I finally put them down for the night, I was done in and ready to collapse. I remember them sending me the first picture of Aria and she instantly brought tears of joy and a smile to my face and I was anxious to meet here.  It was just after that that I was told to prepare myself for a trip to the hospital, Cathy and Nicole were coming to relieve me, with food that I could take to the hospital for Helen, Eileen, Adam and myself. To be honest I was tired enough that I could have easily just gone to bed. But the moment I walked into the room and met Aria for the first time, I found my energy restored and my heart full of joy. She was a fabulous baby, and holding her was a perfect end to the day.

Aria welcome to the family and I look forward to many years of happiness with you, your sister, and cousins.

In Jr. High, I attempted many things for the first time. First up was Woodshop. I went in pretty excited as I had heard that I would get to play with power tools. This was big, up to this point the only machinery I was allowed to operate was the lawn mower or our creepy crawly factory. I was now going to saw, drill, and sand stuff. This was awesome!

So I reported to class ready to unleash my creativity on some unsuspecting wood when the first thing I hear from the shop teacher is “for this first quarter we will be focused on learning to draft”

WHAT, Wait, your kidding me right? But no we spent the first two months learning to draw and print.  I could have cried. But its November now and we finally get to work with wood and my first project would be to cut out a kidney-shaped piece of wood and drill two holes part way through it to hold the family salt and pepper shakers.

So I went home to make incredibly precise measurements of the base of the salt and pepper shakers. I mean I used a ruler and even a set of calipers that my dad had. I was going to nail this project.

So at school I did my drafting making sure that everything was within acceptable tolerances for the kidney and holes. I selected my piece of wood carefully, and then proceeded to cut, drill, and stain to make this an incredible looking finished product. I was dang proud of what I had accomplished.

I don’t remember my grade, because that wasn’t important. I do remember the pride I had though when I took the stand home, proudly displaying to my mom my handiwork. She told me it looked nice (uh-oh) and then sat it on the kitchen island. I tell her to wait, and I grab the salt and pepper shakers and the stand . I place the pepper shaker in its stand and it fits perfectly!! See Mom this is useful! I take the salt shaker and stick it into its spot and it doesn’t fit even a little bit! What I goofed up! I couldn’t believe it. So I took it back to school to fix and discovered that if I made the hole big enough it would basically go right through the side of the base. OOPS.

It was at this moment I knew I would never be a worker of wood.

My next talent was music. There was no way I would be caught dead resurrecting my skills with an accordion, so I had to pick a different instrument, unfortunately the time I had available for music was for string instruments only, and I picked up the violin. To this day I have no understanding on why I chose the violin. I think my mom was happy, I know I wasn’t.

To make matters worse, I played (loosely defined) that instrument both years I was in Jr. High. But since I chose this class the least I could do was my very best. And so I tried and I tried, worked hard to be my very best. We were each assigned a certain position based on talent. I started as 4th chair and through challenges, I worked my way up to 3rd chair. This ended up being the best I could do. So I was at least the 3rd best violinist in my class, something to definitely to be proud of.  So when school let out for the last time, I said good-by to the violin section and watched them walk off. All 3 of them…..

While at Doig, I had the opportunity to demonstrate my intrapersonal skills in dealing with people. One of the school bullies, was busy tormenting one of the smaller kids, I accidentally got in the way and caused him to slip and fall. No big deal, I thought. Then he got to his feet and he was pissed, so at that point I realized I had two choices, I could try to talk to him and explain it was an accident, or I could run. So I ran and looking back on it I now realize that I probably would have been okay if I hadn’t been laughing so hard while he chased me, it seemed to upset him. So weeks later when he finally cornered me, I had to apologize, which I did, and I think my whimper convinced him of my sincerity because he immediately let me go and walked away. So note to self, don’t laugh (out loud) at people, even if they deserve it.

And finally Soccer. During my 7th grade year Doig tried to implement an intramural sports program with other schools in the area. For some reason, they picked soccer. Which is funny as no school at that time had anything closely approaching a soccer net. Well since I loved to run around I went out for it. I can vaguely remember playing a few games and at least one bus ride to another school. Now I know that the coach at that time knew less about soccer than I did and what we were really playing was a bad version of bunch ball. So my only soccer playing experience was at the age of 14 playing soccer as well as todays 5-year olds.

But now that I was off to high school I knew I would find my new and better ways to improve myself and prepare myself for college.  Santiago here I come….

Wow hadn’t realized how long I had been away from this. Guess I need to get started again.

So I guess the best thing to do is start with a brief recap of the past 11 months.  So since my last post we completed our Road trip around America and I have to tell you if you ever get the opportunity to take a mustang convertible (okay I’m partial) and drive through the U.S. then don’t hesitate just do it. Even though we finished this trip last August both Helen and I are ready to throw everything into the car and take off again for an extended road trip again, I promise to post more of the trip in the future.

We bought a house and moved in in September. I can safely say this is our dream house, while we bought it new, we did a lot of updates following our move in to make it just right for us. We absolutely love the place and I plan to post pictures and memories of the process as we go, Best part of this is that buying the house also plays an interesting part in our Road trip.

We took another cruise, this time to South America, around the Horn, from Valparaiso, Chile to Buenos Ares, Argentina. Biggest thing from that trip is we saw penguins, lots of penguins! Oh and we were stranded on an island, for most of the day, when our tour boat couldn’t get off the shore.  Of course more on that and the rest of the cruise later as well.

We also bought Disney passes so we could tag along with our kids and grandchildren when they went. Now I love Disneyland, as much as anyone, but to be honest there is nothing like seeing the park through the eyes of a 2 year old. We’ve been twice, 5 months apart, and the difference in what is fun and exciting for the little one brings a new sense of joy and wonderment each time. And with the coming of Star Wars land, I will definitely be keeping my pass current..

And lastly and most importantly we found out one of our daughters is pregnant and due in
October. We couldn’t be more excited. Tells us that things are going to be exciting as the year progresses.

That’ it for now.