cc: file, Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Diane Cluff, and Maxine Shirts
"Over the years I have had several storage sheds. When I was growing up, the entire farm was my storage shed. I could put (and sometimes hide) things anyplace, and they would be there years later. I remember my maps to the old cottonwood tree, half way between the lower plant and the bottom (north end) of Dad's farm. There were places in the old cement water storage unit by Grandma Nelson's house, the chicken coops, the secret room in the barn, the tree house Daryl Krueger built (../9730), the tree house I built (../9817.html), the silage pits (especially the one we used as a garbage dump), the scales (where cattle were weighed), the shearing sheds, etc., etc. Then I became older and more `sophisticated.' Playboy photos from the trash cans at that old Hotel Escalante, which had become a college dorm and which was cleaned up by Harold ?? and his family, one of the boys in the Cedar 3rd Ward, went in the bottom of my underwear drawer. At least until Mom found them and it seemed like the entire population of Cedar City was told about it.
At the University of Utah there was no need for a storage shed when I lived in the Ballif Hall dorms the 1968-1969 school year, nor in the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity house the 1969-1970 school year. I don't remember where my roll-away bed, which Ray Gardner and I shared at the Frat house, was stored while I was on my mission. My bronze colored Javelin (a Rambler) was my storage shed. That held true for the summer of 1970 when I worked for Pan American in Denver too. On my mission a box was a sufficient storage shed. And when I returned and roomed with Riley Skeen on 1325 East, the 1973 school year, I started to collect stuff. (I missed the 1972 fall semester because of my mission, and actually graduated with my B.S. 1 semester short of 4 full years.) My roll-away bed, which had been in my room at home as long as I remember, was used by Steve Lovell when he was Dad's hired hand and lived in my room with me, and which Ray and I used, as mentioned above, was in that house. I remember because Riley snored so bad. I also had an old nagawhide (sp?) couch from the ranch, with wagon wheels on it. It finally wore out when we were in Missouri City. I think we stored all of this stuff with the old man downstairs from where Riley and I lived the summer of 1973 when I was back in Denver to work for Amoco. That fall was my first year of marriage, and we lived in the apartment Ray Gardner's dad designed as an architect student on 5th South and 13th East. There were two bedrooms, and one of them acted as a storage shed.
In Dallas there was no need for a storage shed when we lived in the Nottingham Apartments. My boxes of rocks fit in a closet. Then we moved to the house on Hanover Street and the detached garage had been converted to an extra, unairconditioned room. It became my first real storage shed. Rocks, papers from college and high school, notes about my wild, world changing ideas started to collect. We were offered double our investment on the house by a stewardess out of Love Field, and the house across the street from Ed Gray on Lockmoor Lane became available. Again the garage, this time connected, had been converted to a family room. It also worked well as a storage shed, and as a room where my friends and I could play like we were entrepreneurs, founding Computer Genealogical Services, and setting out to change the world by changing how information was handled. By the time we moved to Houston, or should I say Sugar Land, it took a pretty big U-Haul Truck to move all of our stuff from Dallas to Houston on January 16th, 1980.
We crammed it into the rental house, the next storage shed, in Sugar Land until our house on Blue Quail Drive in Missouri City was built six months later. This was a four bedroom house, and so there was plenty of room. The rocks were still kept in boxes, and those boxes were wearing out by this time. We did keep the garage clean enough we could park in the garage. That is until Brent and Cheryl Ruggles had to move and needed a storage shed for all of their stuff. We were good sports and so the garage became their storage shed for a few months. The issue was they brought cockroaches with their stuff, and we never got rid of the messy little bugs. This was when I first realized storage sheds could be a health hazard, and it started with volunteering to provide space to be a storage shed. Oh well!
Then we moved to our bigger house at 1307 Emerald Green in the fall of 1984. No more need for storage sheds. The rocks finally went in the rock garden. The food storage (canned wheat) in a closet upstairs. The Seismic Acoustics Lab notes were in a few boxes which were stuck in the garage. However, it wasn't too many years before there were boxes of stuff. When I left Landmark, my office, which had been acting as a storage shed, emptied into the garage. We had money, and so we rented a storage shed over by the fire station on Kingsland the west side of Mason. This was probably first rented in the late 1980's, even though I didn't go part time at Landmark until the early 1990's. I remember when they called all upset because one of the 5 gallon cans of honey we were storing there rusted through and got all over our stuff, and our neighbor's stuff, and was running down the aisles of the the storage shed. Then we couldn't afford the monthly costs, and it wasn't too much longer after that when we moved all of the stuff into the garage with the 1928 Wyllis Whippet.
About this time HyperMedia went under. I was forced to walk on an office lease. The High Priest Quorum came to my aid and helped move all of the stuff out of HyperMedia's Park 10 office. The Kingsland Storage Shed was just opened, and so we rented a space there and moved HyperMedia stuff, and all of the boxes from the house into there. There wasn't enough cash coming in, and using that storage shed did not last for long. Soon Roice and Ben were driving across country in a large U-Haul van with the Wyllis in it, and surrounded by about 100 boxes of unsorted stuff. I remember the snow storm, and the calls of `What do we do now?' They made it. Unloaded all of the boxes. Grandpa Nelson drove the car out of the back of the truck and on the way down, the ramp broke. It all worked out. He drove fast.
So Mom and Dad's house became my storage shed. There were 100 boxes in the basement and the Whippet was in the garage. Mom and Aunt Sara had seen water in the basement several times and they were sure it would flood again and all of these papers would be ruined. It didn't and they weren't, much to the chagrin of some. Then Dad died, and within a year Mom needed to move where there was assisted care. So I went to Cedar, rented the largest U-Haul truck available, recruited a bunch of cousins to help load it, and we did. My cousin Leon Nelson took the Wyllis Whippet, and he has been paying $145 per month for a storage shed for it for about six years. If I want to get the car back, it will probably cost more than it did originally, just to pay the storage shed costs. As I finished loading the U-Haul van, closed the doors, and got ready to leave the farm, I couldn't find the keys. It was an hour later, and after strong feelings that my Dad was there and was trying to say something to me, before I was found the keys and left the farm. I haven't been back since, except to stop briefly to see Uncle Willis and Aunt Shirley Gurr, who now live down at Grandma Nelson's house.
So I drove to Vegas, then to Arcosanti, then to Phoenix, where I picked up Melanie at the Williams. Then we went to Tucson and to Biosphere 2, and drove on into Houston. By this time I was living in the house alone, except for those like Larry Law that stayed upstairs, and my bedroom and the garage became the storage shed for several years. Melanie and then Sara and then Paul helped me to sort and move and rebox and stack all of the boxes. There are still 4 boxes in the bedroom, and there are about 100 boxes in the garage. And as I reported last week, the garage door literally fell off the track, and the boxes had to be moved so it could be fixed.
So Monday morning this week, after doing my exercises and going for a run, I had Andrea get in the car with me to go over to the Kingsland storage shed to check out prices. She was not happy with this plan. Even $70 a month was too much of a commitment for climate controlled storage. If we made this commitment, it meant we would be paying this amount for the next N-years, and I would not clean up any of the material in the boxes, we would not be able to go on a mission until we dealt with them and several other things I was not expecting. So I rearranged all of the boxes in the garage, so the garage door expert could get in to replace the door on Tuesday morning.
Monday afternoon I received an unexpected facsimile. This was in response to the following e-mail sent to Mr. Meng at the Bureau of Geophysical Prospecting (BGP) April 10th:
The unexpected facimile received Monday afternoon, May
13th says:
I think this excited Andrea. Certainly more than renting a
storage shed. I responded on Monday at 4:30 by facsimile
with:
Friday afternoon I received the following response:
So this seems like a good time to put a carrot out there
for those who read these Thoughtlets. Remembering I am
overly optimistic, I believe this trip for Matt, Andrea,
and myself to Beijing is the first of many trips overseas
to discuss the things we have put together at Dynamic
Resources the last year and a half. I anticipate many
trips to China, and also anticipate not paying the
airfare. I would like to have each of you go on one of
these trips with me, and have wondered how to decide
who's turn it is. Therefore, based on the time-stamp
order on the e-mail of whomever responds to this Thoughtlet,
and expresses interest in accompanying me on one of these
trips, I will strive to use that order to give those of
you interested an opportunity to visit someplace different
than your normal grocery store trip with me. I realize it
is getting harder with new children coming, and I expect
even these issues can all be worked out for a week or so.
And yes, this offer includes Bridget and Justin, Chuck and
Di, Aunt Sara and Uncle Des, etc. I do reserve the right to
bump the list any time Andrea wants to go on a trip with me.
I did get an e-mail from Paul this week. I consolidated the photos as a single gif file, and the consolidation process cut some of the colors out. I think it just makes his e-mail even more . . . . . . surreal. It is below for your review. It was fun to watch Matt read and laugh as he discovered each new face Paul was making. Too bad it wasn't recorded.
Andrea bought me a Tom Clancy book, and I'm now about 450 pages into it (half way through) and an extra large tootsie roll for our third anniversary on Wednesday. We went out to a new Japanese restaurant on Mason to celebrate. It was really good. We watched four new episodes of Enterprise for the rest of our celebration. We both like it. I got the flu, didn't feel very good on Wednesday, and ended up sleeping almost all day Thursday. I was feeling better by Friday. Friday night Rachel and I had a daddy-daughter date and went to the Peanut Butter Cannery together. I took some photos, which I will put at http://www.walden3d.com/photos/scouts/peanut_butter. It was a fun evening, and I was starting to feel normal.
Saturday included a soccer game (Matt's team won), and the Taylor High School Theatre Arts I Class Presentations of `Class Action' and `Second Class' by Brad Slaight. Matt played a hunchback, and Gerald the computer nerd. He did very good. The plays were a little graphic, and they discussed things High School kids are exposed to today in a way that hopefully gets them talking about it. Matt couldn't understand why the boy who kissed the girl in the school play also kissed the girl in this short play. Guess I don't understand either.
Today was nice. First time I've been able to introduce a grandson to my friends at church. Melanie and Jared were over from Vidor for a friends wedding and to pick up a sibling at the airport. We got a nice Colby Cade fix. Matt and I went Home Teaching, and the guy who has only talked to us on the porch invited us inside. He also wrote out a letter to Bishop Camp asking his name be removed from the records of the church, and he invited us to come back and talk any time we wanted. He especially liked talking to Matt. Our other visits were more positive. It is sad when someone does something like this, and does not realize what they are throwing away. There should be very serious prayer and meditation before taking this action. And time will prove that I am absolutely right in this statement. Imagine when someone wakes up to realize for inconclusive reasons they have thrown away the possibility of being an eternal family. Maybe my long-term planning horizion, as is reflected in all of the stuff I have in my garage storage shed, is why this topic is so important to me.
There is nothing quite like holding a brand new grandson. Colby went Home Teaching with me to the Schmidts, because Matt was at his Teacher's Quorum Advisor's place. They weren't home. Isn't that how Home Teaching often goes? Tonight we watched the Mormon girl Neleh (Helen backwards) lose Survivor, between switching back and forth to a movie and the Cosby Show lookback. The best part was over an hour with Colby Cade laying on my chest listening to my heart beat and me listening to him breathe. Too bad we don't all live in a 3-D Miniarchology, where this would be possible every day with Ethan Evans, Grant Matthew, and Colby Cade. Melanie did assure me Colby was not named after the survivor named Colby.
As I cite my mind forward (Alma 13:1), i.e. remember the future, there are certain to be storage sheds around some corners. I carry around too much baggage not to have a storage shed or two in my future. I specifically see one when Andrea and I pack up our house to go on a mission. Then there is another one when we go on another mission. And dimly I can see a third one when we go on another mission. But then, who can really see into the future? It's sometimes easier to just wait, and look back in the storage shed."