LONG WALKS AND THINKING

I remember days in late November when snow would fall on the browned and blackened leaves and I would put on a heavy jacket to go for a walk across the fields. Such days seemed designed for long walks and thinking.

BRYAN M. FELIX

Believe you me I understand the appeal of a hobo’s existence. Although not a smithy per se I have been trained in the metallurgic arts, and before settling down I did often dream of taking to a life of aimless wandering (Tell me, what movie?). The only downside that I can see to life as a Hobo is that I don’t like beans. Judging by everything I have ever seen about Hobos in the movies and on TV, beans seem to be a staple of their diet. No me gusta los frijoles.

I love hobos. So let it be known that it was without any malice of heart toward the hobo kind that I set out recently to dismantle and inventory an abandoned hobo camp in the woods across the gully. Assisting me in the effort were my good friends Paul and Cyndi Hutchins. Despite being a self-described germaphobe, Paul gloved up and jumped into the work with gusto. Cyndi photo-documented our efforts.

On the way up to the camp I told the Hutchins, who are the sort of stout-hearted adventurers you would want alongside if called upon to cast a ring into Mordor, that I was not 100% certain that the camp was entirely abandoned, and that there remained a possibility that we might actually encounter a hobo at said encampment. They were unphased, and I was impressed by their steely determination to see the thing through.

Such is their lust for adventure that I think the Hutchins were actually a little disappointed to find the camp abandoned. I was relieved. I dragged the tent out of the bushes and into an area where we could work on removing and inventorying its contents more easily. I think the site had been abandoned for quite some time as all of the tent’s contents were water logged from recent rains, leaves had blown in through the door and chipmunks had shredded a portion of one of the books contained therein.

When it was all said and done the tent contained the following items:

6 pairs of pants

8 shirts

2 jackets

1 boy scout hat

1 electric blanket

1 sleeping blanket

1 empty computer case

5 golf clubs

Numerous empty beer cans/bottles and cigarette packs

5 golf clubs with bag

Numerous candles

Three take out boxes

3 books ("Japanese- The Rough Guide Dictionary Phrasebook," "Why Do Some Shoes Squeak and 568 Other Popular Questions Answered," and "More Filthy, Dirty Jokes Uncensored Edition Adults Only")

1 knife

1 harmonica

$0.51 in change (two quarters and a penny)

1 Bank Card in the name of Bryan M. Felix

1 EBT California Advantage Card in the name of Bryan Felix

I thought it was just as noteworthy what we didn’t find- no pornography (notwithstanding the book of dirty jokes), no drug paraphernalia (notwithstanding the beer empties and cigarette packs), no condoms, and nothing stolen from the camp. He must have had that clean-living smile.

I'm not sure if his name was Bryan M. Felix or if the cards were stolen. I notified the Riverside County Sheriff's department of my find and they sent Deputy Stoyer over to take possession of the bank card and the EBT card. I advised the good Deputy Stoyer of my intentions to dispose of the rest of the found property and she nooded her approval. 

I wish I knew what became of Mr. Felix. I never even knew that he was my neighbor. Did he leave hs camp one day only to get arrested or hospitalized? Why didn't he come back? Why would anyone leave a perfectly good set of golf clubs in the woods? Why did he take them into the woods to begin with? So many questions...inquiring minds want to know!  

Mr. Felix, wherever you are, I want you to know that I took the $0.51 that you left inside your tent and I gave them to a fellow hobo that I know in town. Perhaps you know of him, his name is Edward. When I handed him the $0.51 he said, "Thanks, Josh! ...but you never give me money." (Which is true because, as Edward will tell you, being an honest sort of hobo, he is only going to use it to buy alcohol, that being his vice of choice. Although, I have been known to purchase Edward rotisserie chickens and ruben sandwiches on occasion I have never given him money.) "It's not really from me," I told Edward, "It's from a guy named Bryan. He would have wanted you to have it."

"WHERE WERE YOU ON 9/11?"

On this morning, ten years ago, I came home at 5:30 am after working the night shift at the police department and went to sleep. While I was sleeping, Sarah left our apartment at 19A Lower Weldon Street and went into work at Knights' Pharmacy. I woke up later in the morning (because I slept horribly on that schedule) and turned on the TV. The first tower had been struck, but not the second one. It was all over the wire. There was speculation at that time that this may have been a terrorist attack, but still there was the possibility that this was all just a horrible, freak accident. Then came the second plane.

The phone rang. It was Sarah. "Did you hear what's going on? Are you watching TV?"

That night as I donned my police uniform, strapped on my gun belt, and attached my radio I suddenly felt like crying. I'm still not sure why exactly. Emotions can be difficult to map. It came on suddenly and passed quickly. There was anger in it, to be sure, and sorrow at the enormity of the loss, but mostly it was the knowledge that other police officers had begun their shift that morning with the same rituals, and never came home.

SIPPY CUP CHEESE

 Does anyone know of any uses for "sippy cup cheese." I know of a great many products and foods that were invented by accident, and I wonder if the hidden potential of sippy cup cheese has yet to be discovered. I can see it now... "As the story goes, sippy cup cheese was invented by accident one afternoon by local resident, Josh Tate. As he was cleaning his kids' bedroom he found a sippy cup which had rolled under one of their beds. The sippy cup, which had previously contained milk, had been left there for a week and a half before being discovered. When Tate unscrewed the top of the cup he discovered that the milk had converted into a solid state, which he called 'sippy cup cheese.' He spread the cheese on a cracker and the rest is history!"  

 I know what to do with "sippy cup hooch," which forms when you leave juice in a sippy cup for too long. I sell that in mason jars behind Fairway market. I make the best sippy cup hooch this side of Hemet.

PENS MOVE IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS

I can’t recall the last time I purchased a pen and yet I have loads of them.  I am at a loss as to where they all came from. They’re crammed into a broken mug on my desk at work and heaped higglety-pigglety in drawers throughout the house. This one advertises a car dealership in San Diego, and this one tells me to do my banking with Bank of America. I have plastic pens, metal pens, cheap pens and expensive pens. I have pens with blue, black, red and even purple ink.

Where did they all come from? I didn’t buy any of them.

Nothing speaks as poignantly to me of the largesse of our society as these pens. We hold them so cheaply that no one really thinks to lay a firm claim of ownership on them. We take pens from work, and we leave them there too. We pick them up and lay them down wherever we have need of them. Few would think to return a pen they accidentally pocketed and even fewer would notice, much less care, if one of their pens went missing. Although nobody seems to buy pens nobody seems to want for them either. It is a great mystery to me. They come and go like the wind, exchanging hands, and drifting from owner to owner until one day they fail to complete a phone message or the signature on a credit card receipt. Then they are thrown away. It is strange though that even after throwing pens away we don’t seem to have less of them.

It is truly a mystery.

I have surrendered to the inevitable. I have joined the facebook. Hail Emperor Zuckerberg!

MYSTERY HOLE UPDATE

On Monday three workers from the Idyllwild Water District came over to examine the "Maranatha Mystery Hole." After examining the hole they were not able to say with certainty why the sink hole formed, but they did find an abandoned well right next to the hole, which had been filled to the top with cement after it was abandoned. They speculated that the abandoned well may have had something to do with the formation of the sink hole, which would certainly make sense. They're gonna fill in the hole, and hope it doesn't swallow anybody up.

Apparently we're not the only ones finding mystery holes in the United States these days

LETS DO LUNCH.

If you wait until lunch time to check out this post it'll feel just like we are having lunch together.

Oops! We forgot to pray!

THE MYSTERY HOLE

 On Saturday, my oldest son, Bowden, came running into the office where I was working and breathlessly exclaimed that I needed to come with him "to see something." At first I was reluctant because my kids pull this stunt at least half a dozen times a day and usually it's not for anything spectactular, but something in Bowden's demeanor made me decide to go along with him. Bowden set off across the ballfield at a trot, yelling "C'mon Dad!" over his shoulder, and I followed along at a less ambitious pace. He brought me to a spot just behind the camp's entrance sign and stood pointing at a hole in the ground. Now, holes in the ground are pretty commonplace 'round these parts. Ground Squirrels are always burrowing, and at first this looked to me like a common ol' washed out ground squirrel burrow. In fact I started to tell Bowden as much, but he cut me off, and said, "No Dad! Look inside." I got down on one knee to peer inside and then stepped back in sudden horror. The hole just dropped away to a surprisingly deep, cavernous space, which went right underneath where I was kneeling. I later came back with a board to see how deep it was and, at it's deepest it, seemed to go down about 6-8 feet. You could easily hide several Josh Tates down there.

 Keith, my boss, was out of town when the discovery was made, but as soon as he got back I told him about it. He told me that a long time ago they had tried drilling a well in that general vicinity and that their probe had gone down a ways before it inexplicably just dropped away to nothing and was never recovered.

Now I can be pretty excitable, and I don't want to jump to any crazy conclusions, but it's a big hole and all that dirt had to go somewhere. It's not piled up on the surface so it had to be carried away underground. So either water is flowing somewhere or there's a big empty space down there. Either way I'm pretty eager for this mystery to be solved. The forecast is calling for rain the next couple of days. It will be interesting to see what that does to the hole. Maybe we will witness the birth of Maranatha Caverns.

SIGH

MY NEXT SPEAKING GIG

I will be bringing the Sunday morning message at this year's family camp on 7/10/2011 right here at good ol' Camp Maranatha. These opportunities are fewer and further between than I would like, but then again I haven't been actively beating the bushes to seek them out so maybe it's a case of not receiving what I have not asked for. In any event, I am excited for the opportunity, and I'm praying that I would be filled with the Spirit as I share the message.

SECRET SQUIRREL OPERATION

If you've been coming around for awhile, you might recall how I found an old domino's delivery sign at the dump and affixed it to the top of the camp's truck. It was on the truck for a long time because my boss, Keith, and I thought it was hilarious, but eventually we got tired of it. So then it sat in my office for a while collecting dust, but last weekend, in an effort to get rid of some of the clutter in my office, I decided to dispose of it.

So I snuck over to the Idyllwild Inn like a ninja...

...and put it on top of Josh and Emily's car.

I have heard that the sign then made its way mysteriously onto my friend, Gino's, car. Not sure how that happened. Hmmm... Secret Squirrel activity I suppose.

I'M GONNA RIDE THIS LAST CUP OF COFFEE LIKE A WAVE UNTIL IT CRASHES ON THE SWEET SHORES OF OBLIVION.

COUNTING THE DAYS

According to an article I read in the latest issue of THE WEEK, researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Germany recently concluded a study involving over 200,000 subjects in 86 different countries,  which found that young parents with young children are significantly less happy than their counterparts who remain childless, but that older parents with older children are far happier than their childless counterparts. So, according to this study, the marital stress, sleepless nights, anxiety and financial burden that comes with young childen may be viewed as a long-term investment in happiness.

Well I don't know about that, but I do know that Sarah and I are planning on grabbing a big fistful of happiness in just a few weeks. That's right, Sarah and I are just weeks away from our "getaway" to the above hotel (The Clement) on cannery row in Monterey, CA. Yep, that's the ocean lapping at the pilings in front and that's the historic cannery row beyond. Just the two of us! We're both pretty excited about it. Nanny has graciously agreed to come up and babysit, which is a HUGE job. (Don't think for a minute, Nanny, that I don't appreciate the depth of your sacrifice. You're awesome!) As I told you all before we made the decision to hold off on a major trip abroad until next year, God willing, so we can save up our money and do it properly. We put our trip money in a CD where we can't touch it in the meantime, and have set out to save enough money between now and 2012 to go to the east-African island of Pemba. In the meantime, however, we are taking this smaller trip up the coast in recognition our tenth anniversary. That's a pretty significant milestone, right?

Monterey or bust!

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

June 16th of this very year will mark Sarah's and my ten year anniversary. I know! Ten years! A whole decade! That's a significant milestone, and one worthy of special celebration. Some of you might remember that we had decided to celebrate in grand fashion with a trip abroad. We looked at all-inclusive resorts in the Caribbean. We looked at Italy, including Bari, the final resting place of Saint Nicholas (sorry kids, he's dead). In addition to its connection to the late Mr. Claus, Bari is also noteworthy as the old world city from which the Fusanos embarked for the New World. We also looked into Venice as well as Mediterranean cruises. But the place where our imagination finally came to rest was the East African island of Pemba. Not only is it the sort of out-of-the-way, exotic destination adventure we had in mind but our friends, Reid and sandy Arensen, live there as well. That's like having a couple native guides around who speak perfect english. Plus, we love the Arensens, and we would be excited to see firsthand what they have been up to. But as we dug deeper into the details and laid out all of the expenses it became clear that even with generous help from Uncle Sam and you (You know who you are!) we were either going to come up short or it would be very tight. Uncomfortbaly tight.We're close though. So instead of abandoning the idea entirely, and blowing our dough on a lesser adventure, we have put the money away in a special account with plans to save our money and go to Pemba, Lord willing, in 2012. We think it's worth the wait. We'll use some of it though this year to go on a cruise to Mexico or something. We'll see. Nothing as dramatic as what we had orginally planned for the big tenth anniversary, but it'll still be awesome, cause being married to Sarah is awesome, and being able to getaway at all is amazing given our humble financial position. We have a lot to be thankful for. And we are thankful!

In planning for this hypothetical trip abroad, Sarah and I both came across our old, defunct passports from the 90's. Sarah's was issued in '95, she was 17, and mine was issued the following year in '96, I was 18, and it was just months before we started dating. Both passports were obtained in advance of a trip to Europe.

First of all, it looks like if the young man in the picture to the left opened his mouth Russian might come out. I look Russian in this photo, no? Maybe Polish? Definitely slavic. My ancestry is predominantly of the Anglo-Saxon variety, but you wouldn't know it from looking at this photo. And what is going on with my hair? Get thee to a barbershop! Stat! Didn't I know they would be photographing me? Sarah was charitable to take me on as her boyfriend. That's all I have to say about that.

Sarah, who is brown as a nut and smoking hot in her picture, also looks like a foreigner, but perhaps from somewhere along the Mediterranean coast. How did these two foreign kids meet and fall in love in America?
Then I made the two pictures kiss.

A NIGHT ON THE TOWN

For my birthday, way back in January, the small group Bible study that Sarah and I host in our home, chipped in and got us a night on the town, which included:

-Dinner for 2 at the Hidden Village Chinese Restaurant.
- A gift card for two to the local movie theater.
-A room at the Idyllwild Inn
-And (This is the truly amazing part!) babysitting overnight!!!

We have the absolute best small group in the world! Not only are they very patient with me but I really couldn't ask for a more excellent group of people to get together with every week. Sarah and I feel tremendously blessed to have these wonderful (...and generous!) people in our lives. I look forward to Wednesday night every week. It is the highlight of my week. Thanks guys!!!

I have to give a special "Thank You!!!" to Connie and Mariah Benson for volunteering to watch our kids overnight. This whole adventure would not have been able to happen without that generous and selfless act. Sarah and I felt so comfortable leaving the kids in their care and they were so enthusiastic about doing it that we didn't even feel like we were burdening them. Thanks soooo much guys!

Here are Sarah and I prior to the arrival of our dinner (Bao-bao plate, shrimp fried rice, and drinks). 

Sarah's fortune- "You are a true romantic"
My fortune- "Chances of glamour and excitment are coming to you"

After dinner, we walked over to the Rustic Theater for the 7:00 pm showing of the film "127 Hours," which is the story of Aron Ralston- the rock climber who gut his arm stuck between a boulder and a cliff face, and who was eventually forced to amputate his own arm with a pocket knife to free himself. Sarah and I were both surprised at how much we enjoyed the film. I did not enjoy the scene where he drank his own urine.

Then after the movie we ambled back acros town to our room at the Idyllwild Inn. Once inside we found that our friends, Josh and Emily White, who also happen to own the inn, and who donated the room in the first place, had left us a present of Sparkling Cider on the kitchen counter. The Idyllwild Inn is super nice, which won't surprise anyone who knows Josh and Emily.  Some people just do things right. They're that sort, and Sarah and I are really glad to be their friends.  They really are just amazing people.



Sarah and I had a really nice evening just hanging out without the kids. I'm so thankful to God for my wife, Sarah. Not only is she the most beautiful woman in town, but I truly couldn't ask for a better companion and partner. She's fun!

The room, #20, described in the Inn's website as a rustic suite,  was absolutely "Top Shelf," with a comfortable queen-size bed, fully furnished living room, kitchenette, and flat screeen TV, but Sarah and I were both in agreement that our favorite feature was the room's jacuzzi tub.

Sarah and I have decided to be more purposeful in carving out time to be alone together. We have had babies in the mix for almost eight years now, and we had almost forgotten what it was like to just be Josh and Sarah. Times like this allow us to reconnect as a couple. It think it's important, and even if it weren't important, it is certainly fun! It was really good to get away like that, and Sarah and I are so grateful for everyone who helped make it happen.



MY NEXT SPEAKING GIG

February 20th at Idyllwild Bible Church ((9:00 and 10:45 am). The text I have been assigned is Mark 12:35-40.

MY TAXES ARE DONE!!!

They are completed with all of the necessary schedules and forms attached in the proper order, and placed inside an envelope with the proper address and the necessary amount of postage on its face. I will laugh like a rich man tomorrow as I slide it into the mail box.

Idyllwild California's Natural Treasure