You girls go ahead, have fun...

[mandru]

This is a rant.  Believe me, I'll get to it but first there's some background. ::)

A month ago Mrs. mandru's daughter had said that something she would really enjoy for her birthday would be to take a break from her kids for a couple days and tag along with us on our trip to the annual Fort Bridger Rendezvous.

The Rendezvous is best described by this quote pulled from their home page at http://fortbridgerrendezvous.net/  :

"The Fort Bridger Rendezvous is a mountain man rendezvous in celebration of the Fur Trade Rendezvous Era that occurred in the Rocky Mountains between 1825-1840. It is one of the largest mountain man gatherings in the nation."

That the word "rendezvous" is used three times in the first sixteen words of their self description is proof that the organizers are humble simple folk but they do have fun.

All efforts are made recreate the feel of that time period through dress, activities, sales of furs, foods and the trade goods that would have been valued at that time.  If you are ever in need of animal pelts for a crafts or wardrobe project it's definitely the place to go.  Think crude Renaissance Fair with a lot more dirt and dust.

Other than there being far too many people portraying American Indians in loin cloths who don't have the bodies for it (or should I say have too much body for it  :o ) it's an enjoyable outing for us.

I try to stay out of of Mrs. mandru and her daughter's way when something special is going on though I do encourage their time together.  Ms. mandru was unmarried and 18 when her daughter was born.  For the time that would have been OK.  The father of her child was clearly out of the picture and long gone but her parents were completely unsupportive of her desire to keep and raise the baby. Being so set against her wishes they used the worst sort of threats to pressure their daughter to give the baby up for adoption and even sent her out of state to a unwed pregnant mothers home to hide her so that they could avoid any possible further family embarrassment.

Ms. mandru only got to hold her newborn daughter for three minutes after birthing her.  Then the baby was whisked away by a nurse to be viewed by the anxious prearranged adoptive parents.

Typically that would have been the end of the story but 22 years later Mrs. mandru was still feeling regret and loss so she entered an inquiry with a child finding organization that performed pro bono (Latin for "done for the public good without compensation") detective w@&k for this sort of situation.  Two years later she received word that they had located her daughter and was advised in a contact method that they had found to be effective in returning favorable results for steps towards a first meeting.  Mrs. mandru also received a brief bio on her daughter's situation as being married with two children and that she was a elementary school teacher.  She also lived within a half hour's drive of us even though the hospital she'd been born in 24 years earlier was over 350 miles away.

All the agency needed at that point was the go ahead to send a letter to her daughter that opened with:

"Please allow us to introduce ourselves.

We are an organization that seeks to reunite mothers and children that have been separated through adoption but only when this is desired by both sides.  Your birth mother has been seeking you and has agreed to our conditions that we have set in place for your feelings and security that you have every right to say that you are not interested in making contact in which case we will respect your wishes and communicate that information back to her."

The letter was sent and a positive reply was returned and for a little over ten years they've been happily making up for lost time.  :-X


I'm almost to the rant.  Hang with me a bit longer.  :-()

A couple weeks ago (yes, it was that recently) I was in a contemplative mood and I expressed to Mrs. mandru that I was afraid my lifelong wish to go to Disneyland was a bit beyond me anymore.  The rides I'd wanted to ride were probably too vigorous and as I've aged I've become too intolerant of crowds to probably be able to enjoy it much.  I also told her if I ever express a longing to do the "It's A Small World" ride/exhibit at Disney to just shoot me, dump my body in a hole somewhere in Utah's West desert and kick some sand over me.

I reassured her that there were still a few things that I wanted to do before it was too late.  I've always wanted the two of us to fly round trip somewhere enjoyable on a good quality airline that understands pampering in First Class seating and spend a couple nights enjoying ourselves wherever we are before returning.  Of course I told her I knew that doing something like that would be every bit as expensive as a good fully comped two week cruise on a reputable luxury liner so I was willing to let her pick which one of the two sounded best to her and that would satisfy me as far as taking the first class flights or the cruise.

I also mentioned at that time something that was a lot less expensive but I thought that would be a real hoot and that was to book a couple nights at our favorite casino out in Wendover Nevada which is roughly a 2.5 hour drive from where we live in Salt Lake City but in addition to that we should check around and rent a really hot status type car so that we can strut out across the salt flats in full swag.  8)

She chuckled and said "You goof! You're such a boy but yeah, it would be fun to do that sometime."  Nothing much more has been said about my idea since then but...  ???


This evening was when Mrs. mandru and daughter (I'd elected to stay home) were to set off to go to the Rendezvous.  There was a nice room booked at a hotel and it was sure to be a memorable trip for the two of them.  But...  :(

Sometime during the day today the sunroof on our sensible well cared for Hyundai went on the fritz and jammed in the open position.  The mechanics shop that handles our servicing wasn't able to get her an appointment so she had tried taping a sheet of plastic over the sunroof and that was how she arrived home from w@&k before grabbing her bag and heading out.  I could clearly see that the blue painter's tape and plastic that she'd carefully applied wouldn't last the last the first five miles of freeway speeds and she was on the verge of having a panic attack over the whole mess.

Right before she'd stepped in the door there had been an ad on TV for Budget Car Rentals.  So I pulled up the Budget home site on my computer and got the phone number for the closest local office.  I sat her down at her desk then handed her the phone saying "This is too important to miss and is exactly the sort of reason we keep our credit card at minimum balance.  Call, arrange a pick up for an economy class and then you are going to go get your daughter and have a good trip.  Period. End of story!"  She responds well when I become decisive.  ;)

With the rental availability confirmed, we headed out arriving at the car lot minutes before they closed for the day.  Our reservation for an economy model pulled up on their computer all in good order and the desk clerk told the lot boy to pull car #123-abc-zed-zed-zed around to the front for us but the car that was pulled around front was the last thing I expected!  It was immaculate.  :bow

The sweetest looking 2013 Mustang 5 liter V8 equipped with 18 inch chrome mags with performance profiled tires and the sucker was painted racing freaking RED!  \:/


I pointed at it through the shops window to where it purred in at me while being parked "...this is an economy?"  ???  Was all I could manage to say.

"It's the end of the day.  We're out of economy models.  It was this or a Jeep Liberty but the Jeep doesn't get as good of gas mileage so you got lucky."  ^-^


"I  :D don't  :D get  :D to go!"  :'(  I Pointed at Mrs. mandru "She's the one that got lucky!  :'(


So yeah, I got to be a quick thinking hero plus a little over a day and a half's worth of uninterrupted hours that I can game to my hearts content but at what cost?  :knockout


Thank you for your patience with my long post.  I've now spent five and a half of those hours (that I could have been gaming) composing and editing this.

...and I still done feel any better.  :(

[Fiach]

You call that a rant?

You really need to w@&k on your rants Mandru  >:D

It was a really cool story about Mrs M's daughter, especially the positive outcome and the weird fact that the she lived so close all this time.

A great story, well told  :-X

[Jim di Griz]

Ahh, that's the way of things, eh?

So you don't get to drive in a Mustang; at least you'll be able to see plenty of things like attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion for the remaining day  :)

Enjoy the gaming, and when they get back, take the Mustang out for a run - I'm assuming it's a two day hire?

[nexor]

Fantastic about mum and daughter reuniting mandru, it's things like that what makes our world a worthwhile place to live in..... 8)

I'm betting my last coin Mr mandru is gonna take that "RED DEVIL" for a spin  8-X :-D

[Art Blade]

Mandru, hehe  :-(), when I see a post of yours that goes all the way down the screen without scrolling it usually puts a smile on my face. Then, out of curiosity and just for a quick peek, I start to scroll down a bit to see if the end of that post is anywhere near (which more often than not it isn't) and the smile on my face widens  :-D I then try to do things that need to be done first in preparation of a long read such as getting a fresh cup of coffee, some snack of sorts, backup beverages at hand.. that kind of things and then I finally start to read. I am used to and therefore expect an introduction no, "preliminary remarks" is what describes what I expect to get to read first. You never disappoint me there :-D A few miles down the post still somewhere in the preliminary remarks and a couple of side notes later that usually are interspersed throughout the introduction and entire post I get to see some "bear with me" message as apparently you are aware that you may have gone a little bit too far astray there and that the not so inclined reader might wonder whether or not there will ever be an end to it and perhaps repeat the headline to jog one's memory a bit. Love that  :-D Then I keep an eye out for unwanted repetitions such as

she'd carefully applied wouldn't last the last the first five miles of freeway speeds

because that indicates that you carefully composed your text, edited, re-edited and worked over it again, meaning you put a lot of w@&k into it so the result was immaculate and exactly what you wanted us to see. Hehe  :-()

Lovely post, mandru. Nice stories within stories and well written, too. Maybe not exactly a rant but still, I like it  :-D I bet you are and will be thinking about that racing red for a long time  ^-^ I hope you get to drive it, too. Maybe even on your own. Duct-tape your wife and offspring to the Hyundai and take off for a fun cruise in that Mustang  >:D

[mandru]

Thanks for the feed back guys.  When I make a post like the one above I try to make it entertaining (in my own quirky way) so that there's a pay off for the reader who is patient enough to go through it to the end.  The process also includes a fair amount of revision, checking for little fiddly things like being sure my wording is "audience relevant" and that everything I've written with time or conditional sensitive "tenses" (I've - I'd - I'll) within grouped cognitive balloons of thought is consistent. 

Then I get into the editing and the re-editing.  "Get my mistakes out of the way so the readers can hear what I have to say."  Well almost.  :-[

Art, that redundancy that you detected "last the last the"  (our ever 'sharp eyed' Herr Blade  ;) ) was the sort of thing that pops up for me when two paragraphs with a common subject are merged to shorten the length of a post.  Of course in saying that I've revealed that my first draft in raw form was originally a lot longer before I set to compressing it.  :-D

A picture is worth a thousand words?  We didn't have a camera handy when the "Stang" was pulled up front to get a shot of my face.  So I had to hope that the thousand words in my post above will do.  >:D

Oh yeah nexor, about that "RED DEVIL" and everyone else's suggestion for a moonlight drive.  It is a two day hire which is due back at noon on Sunday but unfortunately the conditions in the rental contract (that I'm not going to monkey around with) relating to who was going to be driving was set in stone before we got to see what was going to be driven.  Sadly I only get to look.  :(

[fragger]

I think we can fill in the blank regarding the look on your face when the car was brought around :-()

Mate, there's nothing I love more than to settle in for a good mandru discourse, and as usual, you didn't disappoint :-X :-D The reuniting of your wife with her daughter, and their current relationship, is a sweet tale - love that :-X

But listen - next time, it's your go. You pinch the Mustang before any one else can jump in it, you hear? \:/ Bugger the consequences >:D

Btw, I recently read James A. Michener's novel Centennial in which there was a vivid account of a historical Mountain Mens' rendezvous. I daresay the latter version isn't quite as raucous - your girls probably won't see any rowdy trappers using a dead guy's stiffening corpse as a card-table :-\\

... attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion...

I know where that one's from ;)

[mandru]

Thanks fragger and anyone I missed.  :)

There's still some beautiful artisan smithed knives and tomahawks to be found at a Rendezvous.  There have been a couple custom Damascus blades that have had me on the edge of tears that my pockets were way too shallow to even consider getting one.

...a dead guy's stiffening corpse as a card-table :-\\

If he was caught marking or holding an ace earlier in the game or short shifting a bundle of trade pelts he's fortunate his toes and fingers (including the 21st  >:D ) weren't being stacked in amid the night's winnings.  Then again it's possible that the ground was too frozen to make a proper hole to dump him in and he was too rigid to fold up and be stacked somewhere out of the way so he could be stored until the spring thaw.

Rough times and rough men, it sounds about right.


I'll admit I did have a serious struggle with making her take the Hyundai and leaving me the Stanger so that I'd have a car while she was out of town but fortunately for both of us I've been able to walk away for the most part from that sort of behavior.

It's either a case of wisdom with age or nowadays I'm too tired to make a serious fuss.  :-D

[Art Blade]

both  :-D

[nexor]

damn mandru, you never, ever forget to dot your name down as co-driver, no matter what ride they gonna bring...!!! my heart bleeds for you brother  :'(     :-() :-()

[PZ]

... I expressed to Mrs. mandru that I was afraid my lifelong wish to go to Disneyland was a bit beyond me anymore...

If you ever decide to go to Disneyland, the best season is the summer, and the very best time of the day is close to midnight when they do the fireworks and light show.  When I formerly went to Disneyland and waited until late in the night I was able to walk on to rides like Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted House without any kind of wait at all because all the typical tourists were watching the parade and fireworks.  It is quite the experience to have those rides almost to ourselves.

I really hate crowds and will forgo visits to desirable locations simply because of the dense crowds.  However, if you know when to go the experience can be quite pleasant.  For example, long ago I was a member of the Zoological Society of the San Diego Zoo, and my favorite time to visit was when it was raining.  I had a favorite spot back in an area where few people visited even when the weather was good - an area that made you feel like you were in the middle of the Australian outback even though you were in the center if San Diego.  I would bring a thermos of chicken noodle soup to enjoy as I sat on a wooden foot bridge across a small creek.

[fragger]

That reminded me of a cool outing I once had when I was living in Sydney. I had a rostered day off from w@&k in the middle of the week and being an unseasonably warm and lovely winter's day outside I decided to get out and make the most of it. I rode down to Botany Bay where there is an old fort built on a natural rock outcrop just a stone's throw off the northern shore, connected by a footbridge. This fort is named Bare Island and was built in the 1880s to protect the seaward "back door" of Sydney against a possible invasion - by the Russians, believe it or not (it was a legitimate concern at that time, I won't go into the historical whys and wherefores here). I'd last visited the place as a seven-year-old as part of a school excursion, so this was the first time I'd been there in about 35 years.

At the time of my school field trip anyone could just walk across the bridge and wander around the site, but nowadays there is a pair of heavy-duty lockable gates at the fort end of the bridge. When I reached them I found a sign saying that there were hourly guided tours and that the next one started at 1:30pm, and since it was about 1:20 I decided to hang around and catch the next one. Just then a tour guide in a ranger's uniform appeared on the other side of the gate and we hung out and yakked until a few minutes after one-thirty, and when it became apparent that nobody else was going to turn up, the guide opened the gates and gave me a one-on-one tour of the place. Since the tour group consisted of just me he took me into a few places that the public normally didn't get to poke around in and let me fiddle around with stuff. The fort isn't a huge, sprawling structure but it's not tiny either, and it's a fascinating place - for a history buff like me anyway. The tour guide obviously was very attached to it, he was an enthusiastic chap with a goldmine of information in his head and I think he felt gratified to have someone else taking a genuine interest in his subject that he could talk with on a conversational level. We spent a whole hour (the tour normally lasts 45 minutes) and would have gone on longer if some people had not in fact shown up at the gates for the next tour. I thanked the bloke profusely for his time and indulgence - I hadn't known half the story behind the place before then, and had I been part of a group I wouldn't have gotten so much info or have been able to ask so many questions, nor would I have been able to physically touch a few bits of history. Nerdy perhaps, but that sort of stuff is like Disneyland for me :-()

Incidentally, once the potential trouble with the Russians had passed, Bare Island soon stopped being a fort and for about fifty years served as a retirement home for vets of the Crimean War and a couple of other campaigns. The cannons were mostly removed from their mounts and taken away or stored but in one case, an eighteen-ton monster had been buried under the floor of its casemate. This was when the fort was serving as a retirement home and the vets wanted to turn that space into a billiards room, and since they couldn't get the cannon out of the room (because the room had originally been built around it) they dug a pit under it, lowered it in and concreted over it. When I'd been there as a kid the cannon had been partially excavated and was still lying on its side in a big hole in the floor. Today it has been fully resurrected and is now back on its original mounting, pointing straight out to sea through the heads of the bay and ready to clobber any Russian ships that have the impertinence to attempt an entry :-()

In still more recent times the fort made a brief appearance in the movie Mission Impossible II. I haven't seen the movie but apparently the fort makes a cameo and Tom Cruise's character jumps a motorcycle over its gates or something ::) Uh-huh...

[mandru]

Thanks for the tip on defeating the crowds at Disneyland PZ.  We'll see if an opportunity comes around for me to reconsider it.


Cool story fragger.  It's nice when life hands us one of those golden opportunities.  The private tour almost sounds as if it was more of a golden ticket moment for you.

In Washington we had Fort Casey state park that was a place I always enjoyed visiting. Created I believe in preparation for WWI it was equipped with several large bore disappearing guns at the time it was active.  The guns ducked down (reloading position) below the edge of the high bluff they were mounted on to completely hide them from the waterway into the harbors of Seattle and Tacoma.  Then if an enemy attempted entry they would have been aimed while in the down position popping up for the slight moment required to fire and then drop back down hidden again.  Two of the guns are still on site.  One in the down position and the other in the up and they pretty much remain smooth and polished from the thousands of kids the climb all over them every year.

Each gun had ammo storage and an elevator that would keep the guns well stocked so those passages and rooms underground give lost of fodder for anyone interested in exploring.  It might be an interesting wiki look up for you fragger plus a Google search then switch to images has a lot of decent photos too.

The 10 acres or so of groomed lawn between the visitor parking lot and the gun placements with zero overhead wires and constant winds is also one of the most perfect kite flying locations I've ever found.



We took the mustang back this morning at ten.  Mrs. mandru of course drove it and stopped to top off the tank before turning it in while I went on ahead to to the drop off site.  Beyond my turning it around in the driveway under our 5 car wide carport (so that the nose was aimed out making it easier to keep an eye on the non locking gas cap cover and fill spout last night) I never got to ride in it.  ???

From my brief stint behind the wheel my chief observation about its handling and maneuvering was that it really wasn't designed for a lot of backing up.  Low roof profile created a small angle of view to see out the heavily sloped back window and the small triangular windows behind the wide door pillars weren't very helpful at overcoming serious blind spots   :(


As old fogies our swag quotient easily shot up 10 points.  8)   The daughter's husband hadn't gotten home from his job yet when the two girls set out but was in his garage and was stunned when they pulled into the drive way.  He kept waking around the mustang saying "The two of you went to Wyoming in this?"  :o


On a positive note the manager of the rental shop hearing that I've been talking about the two of us renting a nice status car for couple days to take a trip out to Wendover and I'd missed out on the fun this time said "Just so you know if a nice couple like you two came in and asked for the two level upgrade from an economy to... let's say ...a mustang, a camaro or charger, I'd easily be willing to approve it."   ^-^

[fragger]

Cheers mandru, I will definitely look at Fort Casey as per your suggestions later tonight.

It must be good to know you have an in with that rental shop manager should Mustang Time come around again :-X That was a nice thing for him to say about you guys too :)

Re: the limited rear-view out of the Mustang, I guess the designers believed that the car's drivers would be more interested in looking at the cars they were about to pass instead of the ones they already had passed >:D

[mandru]

 :-()

[Art Blade]

 :-D

[fragger]

mandru, I had a look at Fort Casey, most interesting :-X I would indeed love to poke around in there :)

[mandru]

Good news: We engaged another rental vehicle yesterday.  :)

Bad news: It was a small U-Haul van and we only had it for about forty minutes.  ::)

That's because the the flat screen TV we were buying wouldn't fit into our Hyundai.  That is of course unless we did something drastic like folding it  in half.  ;)

The big box store wanted $96 bucks to carry it the four miles to deliver it to our home so it made pure sense to rent the van for $30 and do it myself.  At least the installation was a breeze and went without a hitch which come to think of it is a rare occurrence on just about any project I undertake.  :-X

[Jim di Griz]

...This fort is named Bare Island and was built in the 1880s to protect the seaward "back door" of Sydney against a possible invasion - by the Russians, believe it or not (it was a legitimate concern at that time...

That's a mad idea, imagining how Australia and possibly New Zealand would be today if that had actually happened. Puts me in mind of all those alternative 'history' novels or the idea that Erik the Red's Vikings had stayed in North America - both quite intriguing concepts.

[nexor]

Congrats on the new flat screen mandru, the space in our TV unit is only 90cm, so I had to make do with a 75cm flat screen, the wife will "NEVER" change the Imbuia TV cabinet we have   :-\\

[fragger]

@mandru, it must be your time of the year for new toys :-D Pity you didn't get to play properly with the mustang, but I hope you enjoy the TV and computer. Two out of three ain't bad :-X

@Jim, yeah, it is a crazy idea. But crazier still is this: in 1788, after an arduous nine-month trip, the First Fleet of convicts from England arrived in Botany Bay. These were the first Europeans to land there after James Cook had visited about eighteen years before. But just a couple of days later, after commander Arthur Philip had decided that Botany Bay was in fact unsuitable for settlement and the fleet was preparing to relocate, a two-ship French exploratory expedition led by Jean-François de Galaup La Pérouse arrived in the very same bay to claim the country for France, only to find that the British had beaten him to it. So here they were, two lots of Europeans bumping into each other on the far side of the planet from their home countries, each blissfully unaware of the other and arriving from opposite directions (the convict fleet from the Indian Ocean, the French from the Pacific) in a place that only one other European ship had ever visited before. Had the convict fleet arrived a few days later than they did, they would have found themselves in French territory, and who knows what course history may then have taken. They may even have had to go back to England, or maybe you would know me today as La fraggér :-()

La Pérouse hung out cordially with the British for a short time, the two groups even helping each other out, before he and his men set sail to continue their voyage of discovery and territory-claiming. That was the last anybody ever saw of them - they just disappeared without a trace into the Pacific. Which brings up another historical near-miss. Before La Pérouse's expedition left France, one of the applicants for the voyage was a 16-year-old Napoléon Bonaparte, who had made it onto a preliminary list but was later passed over before the expedition sailed. Had he accompanied La Pérouse he too would have vanished and the world would probably be quite different today.

[Jim di Griz]

I stand corrected...that's far madder  :) Nice story Le Fagger.

[PZ]

 :-X

Too bad about the TV nexor; maybe you can convince the wife to hang a 70-inch on the wall and pretend the one in the cabinet is serving as a PIP.  8-X

[nexor]

Take a lot to convince her :-D 8-X

[Art Blade]

nice story, fragger  :) :-X

nexor: offer her a divorce in case she insists on keeping the old cabinet. If that doesn't w@&k, take her to a lovely place where she can admire coffins and choose one for herself. Which might be drastic in a way.. so why not try to slap a 70" monster (inch, not centimetre) onto that cabinet and see what happens  :-()