A Very Special Sunday

I remember the day quite well, my then VERY pregnant wife was due any day and I worked at ACS up the Hill (in Palo Alto it's called The Hill) at ACS as a Customer Engineer for IBM Corporation, the year was 1968, the month was August and the day was the 2nd. Today 41 years ago in San Jose, California. Place of birth though was
Mountain View, CA about 20 miles north of where we lived in Campbell a suburb of San Jose. I had left for work about 7:15 as was my custom, work was scheduled on the systems and subsystems of the IBM Computer that was installed at ACS and I was one of a team of CE's that performed routine maintenance on the computer installation.
In these days there were no cellphones, only pagers about the size of a paperback book that buzzed you when calls came in from sites with machine problems that needed attention or from managers with instructions and questions. I was in the CE room at ACS looking ovcer the chalkboard of maintenance items that needed done that day during the Preventative Maintenance that was scheduled by the sites Senior CE. My pager went off, I jerked and reached for the phone to call the IBM office in Palo Alto. "Your wife just called Mr. Lute", the dispatcher said and added, "she says she thinks she's going into labor". With that I hung up and headed out the door to my car to race home to take her to the hospital in Mountain View which I got to pass on my was to get her! Upon arrival she was as calm as a swan on a summer pond, unflappable, I stood there in wonder as she gathered a book to read, a small address book and other things she thought necessary for this momentous occassion. Then I raced her in our 1961, 7 year old VW bug to the hospital to pace my shoes off and hold her hand thru the largess of the labor. Then into another room where I stood by and watched the birth of my only son and got to hold him only moments after he was born (We had two daughters in following years). Today is his 41st birthday. Happy B-Day Michael, and the very best to you and yours on this most remembered of days. Thanks for the thrill Red, your red hair was quite a sight, I was so very proud then and still am!

A Certain Sunny Friday, Thoughts...

Eggs, those eggs, all so fresh the yolks standup like a 18 yr olds nipples. Gads, beautiful to look at and these eggs taste like EGGS! At 3.50 Euros a dozen for the free range, just picked, dated and stamped variety that I prefer it is a bloody bargain. 2 of them, sunny side up on a Friday morning with my own whole wheat bread toasted in a 50 year old french iron grill pan bought for 2 Euros at a brocante several years ago.
___

Such a joy to eat and contemplate when...what's that?! The door bell, I answer and the lady that surprised us yesterday while we were removing removables from the little house for sale across town (our own!) appears with a little slip of paper with an interesting number in Euros written thereon. An offer, a serious offer to take to the Notaire this afternoon. The roof becomes a possibility THIS year! Allbeit not while we are here, but done during the winter. We need to get to MC at the tourist office and see if she can arrange a new estimate from the local roof expert. The last estimate (in a previous blog) was the sum of 19,000 Euros for just the house itself in slate with the removal of the asbestos tiles that exist over my kitchen as well as Kelly's across the courtyard. That's a LOT of money for a roof I thinks...at the current exchange rate of 1.42 to 1...it's $26,980 USD!! Gads. We need to specify the cheapest bloody roof that is alloowed...the building be an historic one complicates the situation. Slate these days comes from only a few sources, one in Spain and the other from wherever. None is recycled as far as I can tell from surrounding roof jobs I've seen. There are few red ceramic tile roofs here as historically that was changed some two hundred years ago or so. Who cares, the rooftop is so high that you can't see it without some distance anyhow. We shall see.