About Me

I  opened the door  with my headset on and laptop in hand. Everyone knows this is the universal sign for person-working. This was not understood. 

 Sherry-Lynn was frantic, she was certain that someone had stolen a lounge chair from her boyfriend’s back yard. 

This ‘lounge chair’ she was certain someone just walked off with is made out of iron, and weighed about 40 pounds. I put my call on mute, flip up my microphone and say,  “Sherry-Lynn no one can just walk away with that chair, the only way to get it off of Hank’s patio is to walk it through the middle of his house.  Did you see that happen?”

She wasn’t having it.  Sherry-Lynn is 74 and Hank is 90.  

She was insistent that someone stole her man’s  BIG ASS 40 pound lounge chair. She kept on and on and on, wanting me to help her look for the lounge chair. 

It’s not that my job is so ultra important, I can’t go on a scavenger hunt for a lounge chair at 1:30pm. My company is all for work-life balance.

I’m an analytics digital data manager for T-Mobile.  And if  the missing lounge chair was causing me mental anguish, by all means my company gives me the liberty to go look for it.  But this, this is NOT my anguish. I gracefully bowed out of the conversation.

Doug works at the other end of our (very small) home.  He sells high end proprietary industrial air conditioning to data centers. He’s spends the day talking to engineers and manufacturers about air exchange and adiabatic cooling and other big word science-stuff. 

We have very sexy careers.

In 2007, I created a website as an experiment, Italian Dessert Recipes. In less than a year my humble website attracted traffic and brought in decent pocket money.  After a couple of years the revenue allowed us a nice vacation here and there. And then some drama came along, which took away my creative zip and Italian Dessert Recipes has been neglected for quite some time. Drama is a life suck.

I lost my tolerance for drama when I was 13. 

My dad sat down on the living room floor next to my brother, my sister and I and asked, ““How would you guys like to go on a trip and see things that you only read about in books?”

What kid wouldn’t like that? I immediately thought of amusement parks, concerts, and white sand beaches with tanned boys.  But, I also knew my parents…

Don, my dad who I called by his first name for many years, was a philosopher.  Not the kind that gets paid, the free kind that sits around the campfire talking about stars with other non-paid philosophers.  And Marilyne, my mom whom I also called by her first name for many years, she was a free spirit that drew naked people and then framed her naked people and hung their body portraits in our living room.  

My parents were dreamers. They still are. And while my thirteen year old brain is holding on to visions of amusement parks, concerts, and tanned boys on the beach – I hear the dreamers saying words from their mouths like  ‘back roads’, ‘museums’ and ‘state parks’.  

I kept listening but couldn’t really understand what they meant by this trip. (Well known fact – dreamers are not really good at details.) 

I asked,  “Are we going to Mt Lassen?  Or Oregon?  Like where are we going?”

My dad sucked on his cigarette, “That’s the thing kid, we don’t know exactly where we’re going.  When we wake up each morning we will say ‘where do we want to go today?’”

If that was the itinerary then perhaps the beach wasn’t out of the question.  So I asked for the next detail.  “When are we going?”

He took another suck on his cigarette.  There was a pause while he inhaled deep. The smoke came out of his mouth slowly, “Well, it will be awhile. I gotta sell the store first and liquidate the inventory. And then I gotta sell the house.”

Wait.  What.  I screamed, “WE’RE GONNA SELL THE HOUSE TO DO THIS? WHERE DO WE LIVE?!”

He shares his idea, “ I’m gonna buy a trailer and a pickup. The trailer will have a kitchen and a bedroom.  And on the  back of the pickup I’m gonna build you guys a custom solid wood bedroom with three beds and a coupla closets.”

The three of us looked at each other sizing up how gross it would be to share a 6 foot bedroom with each other.

I didn’t like the idea of sleeping in the back of a pickup, but I could endure a summer.  If I had to.  I pressed on for details.  “So, are we doing this in the summer, right?  And then like, we buy another house right before school starts”?

He shrugged.  “Nah, it doesn’t matter when we go.  We will leave when everything sells.  And we will travel until we are done”  

‘BUT WHAT ABOUT SCHOOL?” I yelled. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, “you will learn more from traveling than you would ever learn just going to school.’

Now I’m yelling-crying, “SO, WE’RE NOT GOING TO SCHOOL?!”

More shrugging and head shaking from the dreamers. 

I continue yelling-crying, “LIKE, WE’RE GONNA BUY ANOTHER HOUSE RIGHT NEAR HERE. RIGHT? “ 

More head shaking.  (I clearly was NOT understanding this trip)

“Kid, no!  When we’re  on the trip we will find a town we like. And then when we’re ready to settle down that will be our new place to live.  It won’t be California”

“This sounds HORRIBLE.  IT’S THE WORSE IDEA IN THE WORLD!” And I stomped off to my room crying.  I loved my yellow room, in my quiet neighborhood on Michele Way in Santa Rosa.  I was pretty sure there was nowhere better .

I held out hope that this was just a ‘dream’;, like the time we were going to start an emu farm, and the other time we were going to grow earthworms, or the time Marilyne bought expensive looms because she was going into the  reweaving business, or the time Don had Marilyne paint custom murals on peoples walls in elite homes. We started dreams that fizzled out.  And then there were just the talk-about-dreams.  I was hoping for that!

But then it happened. 

Six months later into my 8th grade year  I came home from school and there was a green pickup with a silver bullet trailer parked in our driveway.  And not too soon after, at night Don began building on the back of the pickup; first a subfloor, then framing for three beds. 

And then that dreaded day arrived.

It was February of 1974.   I was 13 years and 8 months old when I sat  on my bed in the back of the pickup and I watched the San Francisco skyline fade away through my camper shell window,and somehow I knew the Bay Area would never be home again.

We wandered through the southwestern United States for months.  

We rarely saw kids, because most normal parents had their children in school. Our parents did make a bit of an effort for our education. They found some used textbooks published in the 1950’s. But, the books had enough mold and dust to create a sinus shit storm, and we all agreed, it was too much to sacrifice our health for education.

There were no cell phones, only unsanitary pay phones which my dad used once a week to call my grandma.  Our parents didn’t believe in tv, so not having one was the same as if we had a real house.  We had a radio, but we rarely had reception since we camped in rural areas.

We showered in state parks, ate dinner on the picnic tables in the campgrounds, and sat on our beds in the back of the pickup looking at scenery for hours.  We read books that had no covers on them because a bookstore was throwing them away, and the store had to tear off the covers to return to the publishers warehouse verifying the books never sold. 

We made our way through Texas, and part of the deep south before we meandered to the midwest and got choked by the humidity.  Heading for cooler weather we traveled into Canada, then got in an accident that took out the side of our pickup and trailer and we had to head into Ohio to get the trailer fixed.  

The summer was about over, but my mom had a hankering to go to Nova Scotia.  So, we followed the dreamer itinerary to get there and stopped all through New England, and before entering Canada, had some lobster on a pier in some rural ocean town in Maine. 

And then, 8 months into ‘the trip’ my mom had a meltdown. Marilyne was done.  She cried-yelled to my dad, beggin with everything,  “I NEED a house! These kids need to be in school!”

The dreamers discussed all the towns we’d been to and then they made a horrible decision.  They decided the best place to settle down was a small redneck town in southern Texas full of tight minded folks who talked slowly and drank sweet tea. It was a culture from another planet. I never could adapt.  

As soon as I graduated from high school I had to get out of Texas.  So I joined a cult. 

It’s not like there was a sign advertising, “Come be a part of our blessed cult.” 

I was invited to be a part of the true church of God. It’s a secret church.  Very few people know about this, because their eyes are not opened and their hearts are not ready.  I was ready. 

There’s all kinds of powers you can have in this secret church.  The first thing I had to do was learn how to ‘grow my faith’.  IF I grew it big enough I could live in perfect health.  Yes, absolutely divine perfect health where I’d never be sick again because I’d be so full of the power of god, sickness couldn’t live in my body. 

And when my faith got blessed-strong, I’d be able to speak things into existence.  Like, for real.  With blessed-strong faith I could walk in the anointing of the holy one and command money to come into my bank account, tell tornados they couldn’t come near my house, and I could cast demons out of the afflicted.  

To get the blessed-strong faith, that required faithful church attendance. And it required a tithe and an offering.  See, those with blessed-strong faith, they ‘lack for nothing and were prosperous in all their ways’.  So, we gave our 10% tithe, but because we wanted the blessed-strong faith we gave another 10% as an offering to the holy lord.

When I was 19 I met a preacher in the organization whom I joined in holy matrimony.  He felt his calling was to ‘help me’ become stronger in my faith and to learn how to be a godly wife. In turn my job was to do everything else that was needed to keep a house, raise children, and travel around the country listening to pixie dust sermons that helped people get their magical powers. 

I got rid of everything that might get in the way of obtaining superpowers.  I quit listening to the radio, secular music hinders faith. I only spoke to those outside the church with minimal sentences so my spirit wouldn’t get tainted.  I only read books written by the church or approved by a head minister.  I only watched a movie, or TV show if it was chosen by the head of the household, which is always the (hetero) male, because  women were the weaker vessel.  

Not all of this happened in one year. It took years of a  slow soul suck that turned my insides hollow. 

After 20 years no one I knew ever got their super powers.  The church members who claimed they lived in divine health and never got sick, they visited the doctor more than a hypochondriac.  The members who lived in the fancy-pants homes and drove stylin’ cars, they just kept filing bankruptcy once the bills got too high.

Once I left the secret church. I enrolled in college.  I was 39 years old and it took a coupla years for me to graduate with a degree in Computer Information Systems and upon graduation I went to work for Sprint, which is now T-Mobile where I’m working today. 

My life is blissfully boring.   

Thank you for reading this far.  GLCB, is a place where I’m moving my recipes from IDR, to here, where things look prettier. GLCB is a place where I can park my memories, write about the trip in more detail, tell you about Marilyne and Don, elaborate a bit more on the ‘secret church’, and hopefully bring you a bunch of smiles. 

Thank you for reading this far.  Bookmark the site.  Come back often.  

Lisa (aka GiGi)