Posts in category Family and Friends

Thanksgiving

Nov28
2008 Rob Written by Rob

So we’ve just finished getting all the holiday stuff up in the house: the tree, ornaments, stuff on the walls, pretty much everything except the outdoor lights. Right now we’re watching TV and waiting for the pizza guy to show up with dinner. Later we’ll probably get a fire going in the fireplace.

This was my first Thanksgiving in Modesto. The big family Thanksgiving is a pretty new experience for me; my family in Florida was only four people, and in recent years it’s been a real effort to get everyone in the same place at once for dinner. We’d eat, enjoy each other’s company, maybe watch a DVD, and then all go break in our separate directions.

Thanksgiving among the Taylor/Jepson (and now West Coast Warren) clan is a very different experience. This is the big California family gathering of the year, over thirty people packed into the Jepsons’ house eating food and watching football and playing Scrabble or dominos for most of the day. It was a lot of fun – many of the relatives from the wedding made it, including Andy Taylor, the pastor who married us. We all drank the patented Jepson fruit punch and ate super-rich coconut/chocolate/graham cracker cookies and got loud over a cutthroat match of the Mexican Train Dominos Game That Would Not End.

Last Thanksgiving, I was still in Florida. We were newly engaged and planning my early December move to California; my first Taylor/Jepson holiday was Christmas ’07. This year I kind of feel like (along with Shelley Taylor) in the sophomore class rather than rolling in again as a green freshman. It’s still a bit intimidating, navigating through such a large group, but it was a lot of fun.

We both hope you all had a good Thanksgiving and are spending the rest of the weekend relaxing and just generally enjoying being wherever you are. We’ll have some photos up soon of the living room, done up with all the decorations – we’ve gotten it all pretty festive now.

In case I haven’t said so lately, thanks to everyone in the Jepson/Taylor clan who have done so much in the last year to adopt me into their family. It’s a good place to be and I’m enjoying it a lot.

(By the way, sorry I haven’t written for a while. Our copywriting business has been having a record November, and so I’ve been spending almost every spare minute doing client work. It’s been left up to Kristi to keep R&K going by herself, lately. Busy is good, but busy does make a guy tired.)

Posted in Everyday Life

Weekend In Florida

Nov07
2008 Rob Written by Rob

Veterans Day weekend, 2008. A year ago this weekend, I promised to Kristi at Cocoa Beach and she said yes. We stayed overnight at a nice hotel, ate chocolate-covered strawberries and drank champagne, and generally just soaked in the wow-we’re-engaged vibe. It seems a lot longer than just a year ago.

We’re flying into Orlando this weekend to wrap up some old business: mostly, to clean out my storage unit and shut it down. We’ll be shipping some of the stuff back, taking some on the plane with us and disposing the rest of it somehow in Florida. We also plan to get together with friends and family, finally giving Kristi a chance to meet my parents, and then to visit Cocoa Beach on Monday.

I wish I could say that I was giddy-excited-happy about this trip. I’m looking forward to parts of it, like visiting people and fetching my stuff finally and enjoying Florida orange juice. I’m looking forward to walking Cocoa with my wife. Not looking forward to two nine-hour plane rides across the country or traversing the crowded claustrophobia of Orlando for a weekend. I remember last year coming home at OIA after spending my first week here in Modesto, getting hit by that wall of warm humid as I stepped outside, looking around and thinking, why the hell does anyone live here? And that was after only a week. It’s been a year now, so I’m expecting the same effect only greatly amplified.

Maybe it’s just knowing that this will be the last trip to Florida for a long while. Perhaps a very long while. There’s a certain melanchony twang to it. Home’s in California now, among the Sierra Nevadas and the craggy Pacific shores and the broad valley farmlands and the crowded streets of San Francisco. We haven’t even left yet and I’m already feeling homesick to return.

It’s a strange feeling, preparing to visit the foreign land that you lived in for over 30 of your 37 years.

Posted in Everyday Life, Travel

The China Cabinet

Oct19
2008 Rob Written by Rob

They say that in every successful marriage, one person is the spender and the other is the saver. It’s not that I’m cheap per se – or at least, I don’t think I am – it’s just that of the two of us, I’m the one more likely to flinch at a price tag. Part of it comes from upbringing. A lot of it comes from working as a freelance writer for almost ten years, never knowing exactly what my income will look like from one month to the next. My natural instinct is to squirrel away nuts for the winter.

The flip side to that equation is that Kristi likes nice things and is a lot more willing to test the financial waters in the name of something nice and old that she found at the local antique shop.

When we first began sorting our wedding registry – even before I moved to California – one of the very first selections we settled on was the china. True to nature, my wife to be informed me that we were registering for nice china, whether or not anyone actually bought us the stuff. It wasn’t a hard fight for her to win; we both felt that once we’d passed the thirty mark, our days of fine Target kitchenware had been numbered anyway. So we registered for Wedgwood china, which runs retail for about $225 a setting, but can be obtained for about half that when it goes on sale.

We were pleasantly surprised to have actually received several settings for our wedding in July, as well as for holiday and birthday gifts. Between those, gift cards and some last minute MAJOR scores on end-of-summer sales, we’ve recently rounded out a full ten place settings.

(And I’m telling you, we seriously scored: three settings at $100/each at Macy’s. If we buy or receive two more through Macy’s now, they give us about $150 of free and very nice stuff. Ah, the holidays..)

So these ten boxes of china have gradually accumulated in the kitchen cabinets because we had nowhere else to put them. And since about March, Kristi’s been jonsing to buy a china cabinet for the dining room. Every so often she’d find one she liked at the local antique shop, would come home and broach the subject of plunking down X dollars and I’d balk. Can’t do it, babe. We’re slammed on wedding bills, and besides, the world’s probably coming to an end next week and so let’s settle for something flat pack from Target. And then she’d fix me with that cold stare of death that she slings out whenever the subject of flat pack furniture ever seriously enters a house conversation.

The business had a good week this week. Ended Friday with a newly signed contract, a deposit check on its way, two other solid prospects in negotiation and several clients scheduling out billable hours for October. We were both tired after a long week but upbeat and generally in a good mood. So we decided to get out of the house on Saturday and drive up into the mountains, up around the small Calaveras mining towns like Angel’s Camp and Murphys. It’s nice and relaxing to just spend an afternoon up in the Sierras, browsing the little local shops and playing tourists and enjoying a winding mountain drive among the big redwoods. We ended up at a little shop in Arnold full of odds and ends and bits and pieces, some inexpensive, some not.

And there we finally found a china cabinet that we both liked. It was the right design, size and feel for our dining room. It cost slightly more than the antique shop one we disagreed on back in April. And it took several moments for Kristi to pick her jaw up off the floor when she pointed at it, said “I’d like that” in her I-know-I’m-not-gonna-get-it way, and I simply said okay, I’ll go pay for it – let’s figure out how to get it in the truck. I think she still doesn’t believe it.

Our new china cabinet, in its new home and full of Wedgwood china:

china_cabinet_20081019.jpg

I like surprising my wife sometimes. It’s fun.

Posted in Everyday Life, Gift Ideas

The City Beautiful

Oct12
2008 Rob Written by Rob

We’re having a really nice morning here today. A cold night turned into a cool bundled-up morning. We slept in. Kristi had coffee going before I got up, and then after a shower I got breakfast started – french toast with sliced banana and strawberry, orange juice. Now we’re watching TV while I putz around on the Internet and Kristi cross-stiches her latest project: an elaborate Christmas stocking for me. (Wow.) Later this afternoon we’re heading out for a family get-together celebrating her grandfather’s birthday.

As I write this, I’m drinking coffee from my Orlando Starbucks mug. That was one of the last things I did before leaving Florida – driving to the corner Starbucks in Winter Park and buying a big mug emblazoned with the skyline of downtown Orlando, Florida (“The City Beautiful” proudly proclaimed under it). We have two of those Starbucks city mugs here now: one from Orlando, the other from San Francisco. We bought the latter at a Starbucks in the city on Powell Street, near Union Square.

We’re planning to visit San Francisco again this December, as the holidays are coming in. You can really feel it here now – the nights are getting down into the 40’s, we’re starting to run the fireplace again, Christmas plans are coming together. Pretty soon the leaves will start falling. It’s quiet and peaceful and you can just feel winter coming in the air. We’re still hoping to get together with our friends Jen and Matias to see the city right at Christmastime. I’m looking forward to that a lot.

I love northern California. A year ago at this time, I first visited Modesto to spend a week with Kristi. It was my first exposure to northern California; it really is amazing how, over the last year, I’ve grown accustomed to so many wonderous things that back then weren’t even imagined possibilities. Great people. Beautiful places. Different ways of thinking and living. Just a much better life all around. I’m a pretty happy guy.

I still read the Orlando Sentinel online, keeping tabs on the happenings back where I came from. It helps to remind me of the life I left. And when an article shows up like today’s front page story, it just makes me appreciate northern California that much more:

Many of America’s best-armed criminals call Orlando and the rest of Florida home.

AK-47s, other military-style assault weapons and expensive handguns have become so common that cops across the state routinely encounter suspects equipped for urban warfare, complete with 75-shot magazines and bulletproof vests.

In Orange County alone, the number of crime guns seized last year — 3,333 — was only 500 weapons fewer than the total seized in all five boroughs of New York City, which has eight times the population.

…

The killers of two men slain in Pine Hills last week fired 58 rounds from two AK-47s during a furious gunbattle, detectives said. Investigators still are tracking a shotgun, a revolver and a stolen pistol found at the scene.

I went to elementary school in Pine Hills.

Last year at Universal Studios in Orlando, security guards found a 9 mm pistol, two 30-shot magazines, two 16-shot magazines and 69 bullets in a patron’s backpack outside the City Walk nightclub complex.

The patron, an electrician from South Florida, didn’t feel comfortable walking unarmed in the crowd of thousands. His choice cost him two days in the county jail, but a plea bargain let him go home without a criminal record for carrying a concealed weapon.

My parents work at Universal Studios.

In Orlando, officers seized seven AK-47s and similarly high-powered AR-15s in 2003. Orange County deputies seized eight that year. Four years later, those numbers jumped more than 400 percent — 31 in Orlando, 48 in the county. Total for the five years: 321.

…

The five-year total includes AK-47s, AR-15s and Tec-9 machine pistols but does not include 72 SKS carbines seized by the two agencies. Those weapons fire the same bullet as the AK-47 but were not included in the federal ban.

On New Year’s Eve in 2005, a bullet fired from an SKS killed an Orlando man more than a mile away.

The City Beautiful, indeed. And, apparently, one big free fire zone. Glad I’m out of it; wish my family and friends weren’t in it.

Posted in Everyday Life
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