Let me introduce ME!

 

GBE-R.7 Introduce yourself

 

Wow! What genius mind thought up this great topic? Oh yeah. ME!

In real life, I don’t usually talk about myself. I’m normally very quiet. I can add to a conversation, but I’m not a conversation maker.

When writing a blog? I can pontificate for immensely indeterminate amounts of time. And this blog is going to be all about ME Me me! I don’t know where I will go with this, but I am sure it is going to be long. You may want to make arrangements for your next couple of meals to be brought to you.

As of this writing, I am a 69 year old AWM (Average White Male). I can tell you that 69 was much more exciting when I was 25.

This is me last November hanging out with Billie Eilish at the Wax museum in Gatlingburg, Tennessee.

 

 I got married within six months of graduating High School. That was 1971. For some reason, she still puts up with me. We have two adult sons, who gave us three grandsons. They are 7, 3 and almost two. The oldest one can go to a playground, and within five minutes, he’ll have a new friend. The three year old knows all the Star War movie characters, knows the names of dinosaurs I never heard of and says things like “There ‘ya go.” and recently “What the hell?” No idea where he got that. No. It wasn’t me. The youngest one giggles and barfs. A lot. Usually on me.

On the rare occasions when I hear someone describe me, they always say “He’s so…nice”. Yes. It’s a curse. They never say “He’s sexy, handsome and smart”. My older brother got those traits. I got curiosity. It has led me to having quite a few talents and skills. More on those in a moment.

The other thing people usually say is “He’s BIG!” My name almost always comes up after the phrase “We have some heavy objects to move”. I’m 6’-2” tall and have weighed over 300 pounds. I currently weigh about 260. I weighed 220 in high school. People say I “carry my weight well”. Since I am about twice the size of a normal person, I’m pretty sure this is a safe and polite way of saying “Hey, fat boy.” Being this big is probably one of the reason I can afford to be so nice. Not too many people want to piss off a 300 pound gorilla.

Most of my life I worked in the field of making custom trade show exhibits. When I stumbled into this job, I had never heard of a trade show exhibit. If you don’t know what it is, google it. There are lots of images on the subject. It was a fast paced line of work that satisfied my curiosity and my need to create.

I became a carpenter, painter, electrician and plumber. I would also build the crates to ship them in, and then help load them on a truck. Quite often, I would drive the truck, unload it, then set the exhibits up. When the show was over, I would tear them down and bring them back. I visited a lot of convention cities: New York, Dallas, Chicago, Orlando, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Anaheim to name a few.

For a while, I would even build scale models of the exhibits as a sales tool.

I saw most jobs as a challenge to my capabilities. I would take on just about any task just to see if I could do it. I wasn’t as fast or as good as some of the other workers, but I was one of the few that could do it all. No brag. Just facts. (Guns of Will Sonnett TV show reference. Yes. It’s an ancient reference. I’m old! When I was younger, I had Stegosauruses for friends. They’re all dead now)

Later in life, I would do something my younger self would never thought possible; I started my own business building similar type constructions, usually custom commercial cabinetry and vending machine surrounds. (You may want to google that one too. It’s a fairly niche market. Or check out L Brooks Enterprises on Facebook) I did this for almost 30 years. I was an army of one. On more than one install, I would have people ask “Where is the rest of the crew?” They were usually surprised to find out I was the whole team.

My curiosities led me to other hobbies: Drawing, Oil and Acrylic painting, scale model railroading, which led to photography. I am an avid Halloween nut. I have built an operational Guillotine, an electric chair, and a haunted house false front which is used as the entry way into a haunted maze at some fairly serious Halloween parties. Somewhere in my garage is an eight foot wide spider.

I am currently in the process of renovating a house we have been renting for the last 10 years. I am constantly amazed at how renters can trash a house.

The renovation is keeping me from my other love: Traveling. My little RV is waiting for me to fire it up and take off. Soon little RV. Soon.

Well, that’s actually the short version of getting to know me. When I first started blogging on Myspace there was a section called “About me” where you were supposed to write a short blurb telling a little about yourself. That turned into about 80 pages. A lot of it wound up as separate blogs.

So now I am looking forward to learning more about my fellow GBE writers.

If you made it this far, leave a comment. If I can figure out how, I will probably subscribe to your blog, or add you as a Facebook friend.

I’m nice like that.

The scent of smells

 

GBE-R.6  Scent.

What scent/scents trigger a memory, a feeling? Does it make you long for times past, or give you a sense of contentment/unease?

This is my two cents on our sense of scents:

Sometimes a certain scent, like some songs, can take you from the right here, to the right then.

The smell of coco tanning butter or chlorine take me back to the days I used to spend at the local pool. Surrounded by half naked females and laughing kids, feeling the cool water caress my skin after being baked by a hot sun, it was like John Denver singing about West Virginia; those days at the pool were, to me, “Almost Heaven”. Even now, at an age where nobody wants to see me in a bathing suit, either of those scents still makes me smile and yearn for summer days.

Before we moved to the house I now reside in, a neighbor had a lilac bush. It always smelled so pretty when it bloomed. That scent seemed to have a calming effect one me. I learned to love the scent of lilac, so I thought it would be a good idea to plant a lilac bush close to the house. I can now say this should be landscaping mistake number one.

I planted it right by the window where my bed is. The window that is right by my head when I sleep. The window that is usually open whenever the temperature is above forty degrees. The window that gets closed when the dang thing blooms. If I don’t close it, my bedroom smells like a whorehouse, or a perfume factory where a fifty five gallon drum of lilac scent #12 spilled. It’s so strong my eyes water and my nose twitches. Eventually the scent will permeate the whole house and any fabric in close proximity. It may even be a bit strong at the neighbors house. I now know when those light purple flowers start to bloom, it’s time to shut the windows and turn on the air conditioning.

 

I never understood using some scents for shampoo. I do not want my hair to smell like flowers, fruit, or herbs. I would be afraid a swarm of bees might mistake me for something to pollinate, or flies would attack my noggin thinking they had found an over ripe Kumquat. I don’t want the herbal smell of my hair to cause any animals to mistake me for something to take a bite out of. I prefer more natural scents, like “Summer rain”, “Ocean breeze” or “Mountain air”.

I also like the manly scent of Irish Spring soap. The original scent. Not one of the half dozen other “new” Irish Spring scents that I keep buying by mistake because the packaging looks the same. I don’t think I have bit of Irish ancestry in me, but because of the Irish Spring soap scent, I think I would enjoy spring there.

There are other scents that cause other reactions. When I was a young whippersnapper, I was visiting my Grandmothers house when one of my aunts permed her hair. The caustic chemical smell drove me out of the house. My brain felt like it was trying to expand past my skull. My eyes watered. My nostrils burned. My stomach suddenly felt sick. I don’t know what they were using back then, but it smelled like it would remove your hair, and quite possibly melt your head.

The hot acrid smell of roof tar or new blacktop also offend my olfactory senses.

I’m sure there are other smells, good and bad, that affect me, but those are the ones that come to mind first.

Don’t be a stinker. Leave a comment!

Beauty

When I hear the term “beauty” my mind instantly goes to women. I don’t think I have ever met a woman I didn’t like. They always have some feature that I find attractive, and it’s an easy thing to find several. Physically it could be her eyes, lips, hair, and yes, boobs or legs. Sometimes physical beauty doesn’t extend beyond the exterior. Other times a woman’s inner beauty is her best feature and can be the most endearing. But today, my mind goes in other directions.

I slowly become aware that I am waking up to another day. When I manage to pry my eyes open from A) a deep sleep, or B) a restless night, I can see sky above my head. Instead of a headboard, I have a window by my head. Unless it is very hot, very cold, or raining hard, it is usually open. The cool night air seems to help me sleep, especially when I am buried under the weight of a warm blanket.

I normally awake to the singing songs of twittering birds. I don’t know why they think they have to start at 5 AM, but like when my alarm clock used to go off, I can almost always go back to sleep. But even at 5 AM, there is a certain beauty to their music.

Eventually, a cool scent of dewy grass drifts into my brain as the sun begins to creep in through my window and into my eyes. The bright rays of light bring with them a comforting warmth. Without getting out of bed, I know that sunshine will be hitting the dew on the grass and glistening like icicles in winter. An early morning breeze usually starts green leaves fluttering in the trees. Their quiet rush of sound will be a song of its own that always seems to be telling me some secret of life that I will never be able to clearly understand. Maybe it is trying to inform me that beauty is all around. I just have to take time to see it.

Most of my life I was busy working, or just trying to get through life. I can’t say that I have had a difficult life, but it was tedious in that I rarely had time to just enjoy all the beauty around me. I always seemed to be starting the next project, immediately after finishing the last.

While I have always enjoyed the beauty of women, music, and art (in that order) the natural wonders just seemed to be there as background noise or something to see at some point at an undetermined future time.

As I get older, and slower, the world seems to spin faster and envelope me more, quietly suggesting that I stop and pay attention to the wonders around me. I have become more aware of simple beauty like blue sky, sunshine, and pleasant breezes.

I always thought that when I retired, I would get a small motor home and my curious mind would head out to see all the wonders this Nation has to offer. I’m pretty sure I have reached that point where my bucket list has grown longer than my time to achieve it, and my lust for adventure is now far greater than my body can endure.

I still get out into the beauty, but I’m sure I can mark hiking across the Grand Canyon of my list of things that I think I will actually do. When I do get out, I usually try to capture the beauty with photography. This photo is from a recent trip to Upper Michigan. 

 

My appreciation of beauty seems to be getting stronger as I get older. Maybe I just have more time to notice it. When I do, it brings a certain peace to my mind and soul.

What kind of beauty can affect your disposition?

GBE-R.4 Motivation and Expectations

 WHAT WAS YOUR MOTIVATION IN JOINING THE GBE GROUP, AND WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO GET OUT OF IT?

This is easy. Way back in Myspace days, and shortly after dinosaurs roamed the earth,  I learned what a blog was. My first couple of blogs amounted to “What is this blog thing? What do I do with it?”

Those two sentences were the sole content of my first TWO blogs.

I wrote a few more, just to have a reason to write out some of my mind drivel. It’s best to get it out of my mind so it doesn’t continually rattle around in there. After those oh-so-exciting blogs went unnoticed for days (okay, maybe weeks or months) someone actually read one...and commented on it!

Holy crap! Their comment indicated that they actually liked it.

Before that, the only people that had ever read anything I wrote were school teachers, who merely corrected my grammar and spelling, or people that knew me, and were probably just being polite.

But a stranger read my mind wanderings and enjoyed it enough to bother making a comment. Granted, it would be another month before I realized I could reply to their comment, but I was hooked.

I wandered into a couple of blog contests and groups. No, I never won a blog contest, but more and more people started leaving comments on my mind musings.

If someone made a comment on my blog, I would be sure to stalk them, err, I mean, check out their blog and try to leave a witty comment there. Usually, I would add them to my friends list. Sometimes, the comment sections of the blogs were as fun to read as the blogs themselves.

Since everybody just had screen names (mine was NiceInOhio) it gave me a certain anonymity to write whatever I felt like and let the real me out. The crazy, irreverent and sometimes naughty me that I usually reserved for extremely close friends.

Hi. My name is Lee I am a blog addict. 

I am relearning how to find my way to all the other blogging platforms and leave comments, hopefully, not leaving too many comments with the name “anonymous”

My motivation for joining this group is to get inspiration (in the form of a prompt and from other writers) to write again.

I hope to regain some of the camaraderie that Bloggers on Myspace had. I hope to read some good blogs that will make me think, learn, or wonder. I hope to write blogs that will amuse, amaze, or at the very least, help you waste some time and not feel too guilty about it.

And yes, I realize I could have just started out with the last two paragraphs and been done with it. But where is the fun in that?

What do you like about writing or reading blogs?