Picture and Story 13: Shake It If You Need Help

The entire DigitalRich Crew is enduring great sickness right now. It started with L getting a stomach virus and spending some significant quality time with her porcelain friend- John.

At one point she took a couple blankets, a pillow, her Nintendo DS Lite and a book into the bathroom to save time on the multiple trips she was taking there.

We don’t have one of those bell-hop type table bells/ringers, so A came up with a unique plan for L to notify us if she needed anything while in the bathroom. Just shake the maraca and we’ll be by to check on you.

Picture and Story 12

Giant jawbreakers. Or, if you had the money to spend, the high-end brand name Willy Wonka Everlasting Gobstoppers®.

I probably spent $100 on these as a kid, and paid dearly for the pleasure with a special sort of pain you only get with this particularly candy.

I don’t know how to describe the pain other than to call it a tongue abrasion. I couldn’t bring myself to stop licking until the pain was unbearable. I think I even remember having my tongue bleed a couple times.

Do you remember? What fun.

I introduced my kids to these this past summer on our mega road trip around the country. We found them in a wooden basket sitting on the floor of a little old fashioned gift store. I got so excited I called for the girls and showed them. They each plunked down $1.50 for their choice and the fun (and the days of sore tongues) begin within the hour.

Picture and Story 11

This is my nephew Jacob being tortured. Enough said.

Picture and Story 10

Sometimes a throw-away picture- one you snap for fun and don't think much about- ends up capturing something you can't put into words.

This is L. It captures so much of her. Her good heart, kind look, loving gentle smile, and playful spirit.

Picture and Story 9

Here is a photo of my wife Michelle (left) and her sister Jackie taken sometime in 1969.

What a couple of cute kids. It’s so hard to imagine that we were born in a time when b&w photography ruled, as did b&w TV.

Home movies were rare, and the moments and images of our lives so seldom captured for us to later recall and reminisce.

Picture and Story 8

First, the cast of characters- from left to right: Fireman #1, My dad, my nephew C, my sister Carla, and Fireman #2.

Now the story… Carla was leaving my parents house on a lovely 100 degree day, and buckled C into his car seat. The car was running, A/C on, and she closed the door to go back in and get baby J to put him in the car.

While this was happening, C unbuckled himself, climbed into the front seat, locked the doors, and proceeded to check out the contents of Carla’s purse. When Carla came out to put the baby in the car all heck broke loose.

C wouldn’t unlock the doors, and probably didn’t quite understand much of anything. Besides being 2 years old, the music was BLARING out of the speakers thanks to C cranking up the volume.

Things really got out of control when my dad came out to see what was going on. He gets a little wacky under stress and all he could see were two possible outcomes to the horror he beheld in his driveway: 1) C would shrivel up and die in the heat when the car ran out of gas later sometime the next day and the A/C stopped. 2) C would shift the car into drive and crash into the house killing all occupants in the house and car despite the emergency brake being on.



And so…the fire department was called. They got C out in no time at all, and you can see from the photo at the top my sister was not embarrassed at all by the episode. And C’s look pretty much says it all- “what in the world is going on here?”






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Picture and Story 7

To the reader perhaps this picture just looks like a goofy collection of interesting looking people with bad hair. To me, its family. With bad hair.

A few things jump out at me immediately when I see this. Firstly, anything even remotely related to air travel is a sort of sleeping pill for me. I get on a plane, I fall asleep. I get near a plane, I fall asleep. I go to the airport to see my mom and dad off on a trip…I fall asleep. In this picture- sound asleep. I even threw in the “bed head” look for full effect.

Michelle and her sister are proudly exhibiting their best hair of 1995, while little K appears to be frightened and seeks escape from the big hair monsters on her mom and aunt’s heads.

Mom was into the Brillo look at the time, while my sister Carla appears to have the most timeless hair of the group. What woman can ever go wrong with flowing unmade hair? It seems that would be the cut of choice when you know you will be in pictures that are meant to last a lifetime (graduations, marriages, sitting at airport gates, etc).






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Picture and Story 6

This is a baby picture of our first daughter- K from 1993. Seeing it brings immediately to mind one of my worst blunders as a husband.

The night Michelle told me that her contractions had begun and we needed to get to the hospital we launched into red-alert status. I grabbed our things, all pre-packed and ready, and loaded the car. I came back up the stairs to escort Michelle and off to the hospital we sped. It was the middle of the night and I was exhausted. Self-centered alert #1.

As we drove I saw our local Dunkin Donuts and pulled over to grab a cup of coffee. Self-centered alert #2. Michelle didn’t say anything as I got out… later she told me it was because she was in the middle of a seriously painful contraction.

I ran in, grabbed a large coffee, and we resumed our trip to the hospital. It wasn’t until a few days later that Michelle informed me how ticked off she was. I guess that was pretty insensitive.






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Picture and Story 5

I went through a "photography" phase in high school. I was given an old 35mm SLR camera that my grandfather had owned, bought some film, and snapped away.

Soon after I signed up for B&W Photography as an elective while in the 10th grade, and as part of the class we learned about trick photography.

This was one of my first attempts- back in the day before simple image manipulation on computers. It involved taking two separate photographs, and changing out the negatives while exposing only one half of the photo paper to light at a time.

The subject is Travis Pape- a good friend from my church youth group, and the photo was actually taken at our church- The Gaithersburg Church of the Nazarene in Maryland, shot sometime in 1982 or 1983.

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Picture and Story 4

K & S. Best friends since kindergarten. In 2001 she moved away to North Carolina, and I will never forget the weeping and gnashing of teeth that poured out of my little girl when her friend moved away.

Now K (about to turn 14) and S (just turned 15) remain close friends, even though they are hundreds of miles apart. Our two families have been able to sustain a long-distance friendship and we love their whole family dearly.

As I write this S and her family is upstairs, visiting our home for the week, and K & S are together again.

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Picture and Story 3

Have you ever plopped a couple of those tinny tokens in the ride at Chucky Cheese that takes that grainy bad quality picture of your cute kid and then spits it out on cheap thermal paper?

Your lucky if you make it home without it getting all crinkled in your wallet or pocket.

Imagine going through old photos and finding one in mint condition 9 years after the photo was taken.

Here is our girl K, 4 years of age, back in 1997.

Chucky Cheese is most certainly not a regular hang for us. It has the worst pizza in the world, horrible service, bad entertainment, and the play area is a massive bacteria farm. About the only time we have ever gone is when one of our girls friends had a birthday party there. And at each one we have one of these thermal photos.






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Picture and Story 2

While this picture seems to be of me doing some sort of weird white-guy dance, there is really a rather interesting story behind it. Firstly- I am not dancing- I am in fact modeling what may be the ugliest pair of water-shoes ever.

Several years ago the company I worked for at the time conducted a retreat and strategic planning session in Rhode Island. There was a time back when the music companies were FLUSH with cash that we did these kinds of retreats for executives. The money spent back in the day was mind boggling.

There were about 30 of us and we stayed at an ultra-nice resort. After a couple days of meetings and planning sessions we got to have a bit of fun.

Our CEO had reserved a couple 12-meter yachts/sailboats (the kind that race in the America’s Cup) for our team to staff and race. The group was broken in two and we went through training for an hour or so. Our lovely and kind group assistant had made a run to Wal-mart to buy a selection of water-shoes for anyone that did not have proper shoes for the sailboats. I was one of them. And the only size 12 in the bunch were the horrible neon-yellow shoes in this picture.

Racing the 12-meters was amazing. Everything went great except for the accident.

During training we were told repeatedly that NO MATTER WHAT keep your head away from the hand-crank thingy (don’t recall the real name of it). If you are manning it and your hands slip off it will spin furiously and anyone near the crank pedals will get a nasty head-shot.

Sure enough, our friendly finance executive, David, got his head too close. It was a sudden and shockingly brutal attack. David went down for the count, and the blood flowed liberally. He was fine- just needed a couple stitches, but none of us wanted to cut short our day on the water so we called a speed boat from shore that came and picked David up and took him to the hospital. We were all somewhat concerned about him…but we had a race to win.






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Picture and Story 1

Thought I would start something new here at DigitalRichDaily. Like most of what I write, it’s for me. If it’s interesting to you too, cool.

I see this blog as an amazing opportunity to journal stories, thoughts and events that my family will be able to reference for many years. What an amazing thing this is. How would the world be different if generations past had the same ability to document life in this way? While the prominent in society certainly did (published books, letters, etc), most did not.

The idea here is to publish a family photo and tell the back story. This first edition is a simple one. The picture is of A when she was younger, sitting in our empty living room in our old house. The home was the first we owned, and getting in the house took up about all the liquid wealth we had, leaving little for furnishings. The entire time we owned this house (1995-2003) the living room remained absolutely empty.

It was awesome.

The room became our playroom. Not the kind packed with plastic toys, dolls and assorted plastic things made in China. It was a serious playroom. An empty playroom. The kind you did somersaults in, where we stood handstands, hoolahooped, wrestled, fought tickle battles and played soccer with little plastic balls in. This room was the place we set up the Christmas tree, played indoor football, had sleepovers in. Nothing like this in our new home. I miss it.






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