When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #37

37- 6th grade-Valentines day-bag/accelerated class-yikes!-My height –too tall!

I am sure that you have had a class Valentines party. You bring Valentines and exchange them with your classmates. It’s exciting and you have fun!

I was an average student and had a couple of friends. I was not popular. I was just average, like most of the class. I was at an awkward age. I was skinny and tall. I was 5’5 in 6th grade. I was the tallest one in my class. We had two 6th grade classes and I was the tallest in ‘both’ classes! That did not help. Most boys are shorter than girls until they get into high school. I wore size 7 shoes in 6th grade. I felt all arms and legs and feet! My dad, jokingly and fondly, would sing ‘Clementine’; she wore boxes without topses and her shoes were number 9! I hated that song!

I was a pretty hard working student. I wasn’t the smartest in class but I worked hard. Both of my parents had a photographic memory. They could see things once or twice and remember them. Not me! I had to painfully spend hours and hours memorizing facts, figures, dates, etc. I have a few children now that took after their grandparents and have their photographic memories. Lucky them!

I was moved into the accelerated (smart kids) class in both 5th and 6th grade. That caused me a lot of anxiety. There were kids in both grades that studying came so easy to them and it was not easy for me. I worked hard to make all those A’s and a few B’s. If I got a C, I was mortified.

Back to the party. I have sort of laid a background of what I was like before getting to this party. I was shy and didn’t have but 2 or 3 friends. Our teacher gave us a class list so we could give valentines to those who we wanted. We had a brown paper sack that she had us decorate and we hung our sacks across the back of the classroom. We hung them up two weeks before Valentines Day. Well, three days before our party I only had 3 valentines in my bag. Several of the other kids already had a bag full!

I felt awful! My mom had bought a box of valentines for me and I gave one to each one on our class list.

The class rule back then was you did not have to give a valentine to everyone in the class. You could give a valentine to whomever you wanted to give one. After seeing only 3 in my bag I went home and got another box of cards and made them out all to myself! I got to school early and when no one was in class I put them all in my bag! I tried to write in different handwriting so it looked like someone else wrote the cards to me.

One student in my class said, ‘I bet you wrote those all to yourself!’ He said it in a mocking way. I boldly declared, “I did not! I have cousins and they sent them to me.” That was a bold lie! I didn’t have any cousins that sent them to me. But I felt better about having a sack full of valentines than only the 3 that were in there. One of those 3 was from my teacher and the other two from my two friends.

Looking back on that experience I realize how insecure I was and my lack of confidence in myself. Some of this was due to my height! I was so tall! I think how pathetic to give myself all those cards but I so wanted to fit in and have a full bag of valentines. I am sure I was not the only one who didn’t have very many cards from classmates. At least when my children were little and in grade school, the teachers gave a list and you were required to give each person on the list a card. I liked that. No one was left out and no one felt bad. Progress!

When I got into high school I resolved that I was going to have self-confidence and feel good about myself and not be so shy and insecure. I was both confident and secure! I felt good about who I was. This in part was due to the fact that the gospel (our church) was a big part of my life and I knew God loved me for who I was.

When Grandma Was A LIttle Girl - #36

Story # 36 - 6th grade – high jump and track

Isn’t it a lot of fun to run a race or jump high or out far the best you can? Competition can be fun!

I loved running when I was in grade school. I could run fast! I remember that in 4th, 5th and 6th grades we would have track events toward the end of school. I was never good at doing hurdles. Somehow I had trouble getting one leg to clear the top of the hurdle. My knee would bang on the top of the hurdle and down came the hurdle and me! Now that I think back on the event, I think it was just not having confidence and a positive mental outlook. Somehow I just put up a mental block and was somewhat afraid of getting hurt and making it over the top of the hurdle. I also didn’t like getting scraped up on the hurdle and the cinder we ran on. That was worse than gravel!

What I did like was 'running on the track!' I was a fast sprinter! I could take off like a shot! There are two kinds of runners, distance and short runners. The distance runners kept an even and steady pace. The sprinter, or short distance runner, takes off as fast as they can and run a short distance and then they are done. I was the later-the sprinter. I loved the relay races and I could take off fast and pass off the baton to the next runner.

I also like doing the high jump. We would run and leap up into the air and dive over the bar and land in the pit. The highest I jumped was 4 feet and I was in 6th grade. It’s funny, but I didn’t mind jumping over that high jump bar and was not afraid of being hurt. But I sure didn’t like the hurdles. You fell on cinder whereas with the high jump you landed in a pit and didn’t get hurt.

I also liked doing the broad jump. You would run and then leap forward to see how far you could jump and land in the sand. I did okay. I only jumped 5 feet forward. I liked the javelin throw. I couldn’t throw them far but it was fun. I liked the track events.

I was not good at baseball. I could run fast to the bases but it was hitting the ball. I never hit it far and long. I usually hit it just barely past the bases and it was usually caught! But I had fun playing baseball.

I liked playing basketball. I could usually hit the basket most of the time! I did not play sports in Junior High or High School. I went to them all and loved cheering at them.

When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #35

Story #35 - Fizzies! - Burp!

Do my grandchildren know what a ‘Fizzie’ is? Have you ever heard of that word?

When I was little they had ‘Fizzies’. They were flavored tablets that you dropped into a glass of water. Think of Alka Seltzer and how that tablet fizzes and foams in a glass of water. That is how Fizzies worked! There were about 8 or 10 tablets on a cardboard. They came in different flavors. My favorite flavor was ‘Root beer!’ Just the other day I went to the Internet and googled ‘Fizzies’ and they actually still make them! I was amazed! They certainly have priced them ‘much higher’ than when I was a kid. You could buy a package for 25 cents! Now they want much more than that!

My brothers and I would try to let one sizzle on our tongue! You couldn’t do it for very long and it fizzed and would start bubbling on your tongue because of the moisture on your tongue. Then it would burn your tongue! My brother Geoff made himself hold it in his mouth and after half a minute his face got really red and the gas built up in his mouth and his mouth popped open and bubbles came spewing out! It was disgusting to look at but oh, so funny to watch!

I remember begging my mom to please buy some Fizzies when she went to the store. She did not do it often but it was such a treat when she did! I would have to say that Fizzies were my most favorite drink as a kid. I liked them better than soda pop. I would save my money, at least I tried to save my money whenever I got some from collecting soda bottles or doing an extra chore, and buy my very own package of Fizzies. If I had to choose my favorite soda pop it would be Fanta Grape soda. The soda was made by Fanta.

I can remember being at work one day when I was 18. I worked at Security Bank & Trust. Across the street from us was the Coca Cola Bottling Company. One day someone had bought a Coke. When they opened the bottle they were about to take a drink and someone stopped them and though they saw something in the bottom of the Coke bottle. It turned out to be a ‘dead mouse!’ Yuck! That sure raised attention and the Coca Cola Company across the street heard about it!

When GrandmaWas A Little Girl - #34

Story #34 - Picking cotton – Ouch!

Have you ever picked cotton?

I had mentioned in another story that we had irrigation ditches close by our house. There were two cotton fields that grew close by. We lived on the edge of town and there were areas that had large fields. One was across the street from where we lived and another one was on the west side of our house. Both of those fields were cotton fields. They also grew cotton across town from us.

When I was little I liked to watch the farmer with his tractor plow up the long furrows (rows) of dirt. When the cotton plants started to pop up through the dirt and get a little taller, it always looked so neat! Then as the plants got taller they would get buds on them. This would be the cotton bud. It would be a green pod and as it matured it would turn brown and when it was ready to pick the pod would be hard,brittle and dried and would ‘pop open’! The pods were sharp and prickly and the cotton would be white and soft and had a seed buried in the cotton fluff.

They would hire Mexicans to pick that cotton. I was curious one day and walked over to the cotton field and picked a few cotton buds. OUCH! When those hulls were dried and open, you had to be careful because the hulls on the ends were sharp! I then understood what the song meant about picking your fingers to the bone! You had to wear gloves and if you didn't your fingers would bleed!

There was a cotton gin across town across the railroad tracks. The gin would separate the cotton from the seeds. When you picked a piece of cotton from the plant it had a seed in it. My mom would go over to the mills for ‘cast offs’. That is not the correct name but I can’t think of the right one. It was leftovers that the mill did not want. My mother would buy several bags of it for real cheap. I don’t know what she paid for it except that it was cheap. She would use our cat brush (we had cats and brushed their fur with the brush) to comb the seeds out of the cotton. We would help her brush the seeds out of the cotton. That was a hard job too. Your fingers would get sore because if you were not careful when you brushed the seeds from the cotton, the brush pricked your fingers and that hurt! You would use one hand to hold the handful of cotton and use the other hand with the brush and brush through the cotton to remove the seeds. My mom made us homemade quilts and used that cotton for the batting she put in the quilts. Those quilts sure kept us warm and toasty!

When Granmda Was A Little Girl - #33

Story #33 - Ditches, asparagus and spiders!

Close by our house there were irrigation ditches. The farmers who raised cotton used these irrigation ditches. As kids, we would walk in these ditches and they were thigh high or 2 feet or so deep. They always tall grass growing from them from the irrigation water that would flow in them. Wild asparagus would grow in them and my brothers and I would pick it and bring it home. My mom would wash the dirt from it and then cook it for a vegetable to go with our dinner. It was mmmm good! I have not eaten asparagus in years. I do remember as a kid though how good it tasted! The asparagus would be fat and juicy! I loved to melt butter over it and add a little salt.

You had to be careful when you went in those ditches. Snakes liked the cool ground. They were usually the water moccasin snakes. We also had to watch for tarantulas. Shiver! They creep me out! My other Geoff caught a tarantula and he let it crawl up his arm and across his shoulders and down the other arm. Yuck! He asked us if we wanted to touch it or hold it. No thanks! Actually tarantulas are very delicate. If you drop them they can die. I never had the desire to want to hold them! I hated spiders!

One day my brother Douglas was walking around to the back of the house and he almost stepped on a Copperhead snake and they are poisonous. My dad had shot a few rattlesnakes with his 22-rifle. Living in the southwest snakes were common. We were in the car driving down to Alamogordo and a rattlesnake was stretched across most of the road. It was six feet long. My dad drove over it. We quickly looked out the back window to be sure it was still on the road. It was and it was not stretched out so much anymore. The danger of driving over a snake was that it could wrap itself around the axle. You stop the car or pickup truck and get out and ‘zap’ you were bit! Not a good thing! Every now and then you would read in the local paper how a rattler bit a child or an adult. An adult had a better chance of surviving than a child. Those snakes are poisonous.

We also had centipedes, scorpions and Vinagaroons. A Vinagaroon looked liked a scorpion but it was a dark maroonish brown color and smelled liked vinegar. The desert had its interesting life forms. About nine months after grandpa and I got married we left New Mexico when his tour of duty in the Air Force ended and moved back to Oregon where he was from. The only thing I missed about the desert was seeing my folks. I didn’t miss anything else! I didn’t miss the dry climate, the dust, or the ‘life forms’ that crept or crawled!

New Address!!!

In my last post I gave our new address and left off the 'SW' at the end of the address so I went back in and corrected that. I thought I may as well just post
the address.


Our new address as of Oct. 1st will be:

Neil & Diana Guptill
601 Balmer Street SW
Orting, WA. 98360

YIPEE! Our house sold!!!

The first picture is a picture of me pointing to the 'sold' sign in front of our new home. There is also one on the front of the picket fence. It is sold to 'us!' :o) Sorry the pictures are not close ups. Our house is the first one on the left corner as you come into 'The Meadows' housing development. Neil picked the corner house as that lot is slightly bigger and we only have one neighbor behind us and one on the right. Those two neighbors are both police officers and have patrol cars. We feel so safe!

The next picture is a view of Mt. Ranier from the front of our house by the dining room window. Our home is in Orting, WA. It's about half an hour south of where we presently live.

The last picture is of me 'celebrating' that our home is 'sold!'

Our home selling was the best birthday present ever! Our home was on the market a week shy of 4 months. Whew! I am so excited because I won't have to climb stairs any more! It is getting harder on my knees and hips carrying Kirsten up and down those stairs! This will be so much better having a rambler. Our new home is a rambler. We are moving from 2,060 sq. ft. to 1,440. It's about 620 sq. ft. smaller but we're okay with that. It's just Kirsten and dad and I. Our new home is a 3-bedroom, 2-bath home. So we still have room for family and other guests to come and visit us! :o) Kirsten will have a new home to explore and get used to and have fun!

The house is almost complete. They are finishing up on the inside. Next week they install the appliances and carpet. We had them add AC too. Yes, air conditioning! I don't care if we only use it for 2 months out of the year. It's nice to have! When we get settled, we will take pictures!

The first two houses on the corner (ours being the one on the left)in the development have a white picket fence. It only wraps 2/3rds around the front yard. Since they offered a 6% buyers bonus, we are having them enclose the front yard with a gate. Between our home and our neighbor, we are having them put a six foot wooden fence with a gate. I told them I have grandchildren and I need the yard fenced so my grandchildren are safe. One thing I did NOT tell them, it keeps other people and pets from cutting the corner across our yard! :o) The developer liked the idea of the enclosed fence and gate across the front as it will look nice and compliment that corner. I certainly agree with that! :o)

Our new address as of Oct. 1st will be:
601 Balmer Street SW
Orting, WA. 98360



We will move the last weekend of the month. The buyers for our home close on Sept. 30th and take possession of our home by 9pm the same day. We will have everything out of our house by Sept. 28th. We sign the papers for our new home Oct. 1st. Wahoo!

When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #32

Story #32 - It’s the middle and July and we survived the hailstorm!

Have you ever been in a hailstorm? It’s noisy!

I was somewhere between 10 and 12 years old. The month was July and it was hot! We had a freak thunderstorm. I can vividly remember how ‘black’ the clouds looked. I think it was about mid-morning.

All of the sudden the wind blew and the storm hit and we scurried around closing all the windows in the house. Then we looked out the kitchen window into the front yard and saw hail starting to hit the driveway in front of the house. Then it just peppered the ground. It seemed to last about 20 minutes. Our house was made of adobe and stucco and it muffled the sound. The pantry was made out of cinder block and you could hear it come down on that roof. It passed over us and then we went outside to ‘inspect’ what had happened! First we went to go out through the pantry entrance to the backyard but we couldn’t get the back door open. Then we had to go out the front door onto the porch and we walked around to the back of the house. Oh, my goodness! The wind direction that blew the storm in came right at the back of the house. I remember wearing my slippers (thongs) and I was in shorts and there was about a foot and a half of hail piled up against the screen door! No wonder it wouldn’t open! I remember getting a shovel and shoveling the hail off the back step. It also damaged that corner of the roof. My dad had to repair it. It stripped the leaves off of some of the tree branches. We had elm trees growing along side the driveway on the west side of the house, by the pantry side. We looked out into the cotton field next to our fence. The cotton was stripped! It was like every other row of cotton was standing and every other row was stripped.

The hail came through in ribbons. It was weird the way that happened. There were cars that had hail damage, little dents in the cars. Stores had some damage. It was a pretty strong hailstorm that blew that morning. I never saw another one after that. It’s the only storm I can remember ever while I lived there and I lived in Tularosa for 20 years too.

This reminds me of one other really bad hailstorm that grandpa and Kirsten and I experienced in May 2006. We went down to San Antonio, Texas to pick David up from A-School. He was in the US Navy. He was finished and was being stationed in Bangor, Washington, about 1-½ hours from where we lived in Covington, Washington. We had heard on the radio in our motel room that thunderstorm and hailstorms were going to be in the area. Well the storm hit and the wind blew and the rain came down sideways. Then the hail started. The hail was as big as jawbreaker candy! The power went out. It was dark! The storm lasted for about an hour. In the morning we assessed the damage. The west end our two-story motel was pocked full of holes. Its' siding was ruined! Our car had little tiny dents all over the roof. It cracked our right side view mirror and a small piece fell out onto the pavement. We took pictures right then so we would have them to show our insurance company. David was about 8 miles away and they didn’t get any hail, just wind and rain. That was the worst storm I had ever experienced and I ‘never’ want to experience another one like it! I prayed hard that we would all be safe and we were.

Grandpa says that we got better gas mileage on the way back. Now our car was more ‘aero-dynamic’ like a golf ball!

When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #31

Story #31 - Lighting strikes in the driveway! Yikes!

When you see the lightening flash and hear thunder crack loud in the sky, does that scare you?

My mom had two fears in her life, one was mice and the second one was lightening and thunder! I don’t like powerful windstorms; those scare me! My mom did like soft thunder just not the loud and frightening kind of thunder. She would tell us that when we heard the soft rolling thunder that it was an apple cart dumping over on the cobblestones up in heaven. A horse drawn wagon was pulling his load of apples. The wagon had bushel baskets of apples. When the wagon hit a bump in the cobblestone, a bushel basket of apples would fall out of the back of the wagon onto the road. The apples rolling along the road was the sound of the rolling thunder. Although this story is fiction, it comforted me and I could imagine it actually happening. When I had children of my own and they were little and they were frightened of the lightening and thunder I would tell them that story.

Living in southern New Mexico we saw some very spectacular lightening storms! When you heard the thunder you ran to get indoors! It was not uncommon to see the lightening go from the sky to the ground and from the ground back up into the sky. Sometimes when a thunderstorm blew in the sky was ominous and dark and the lightening bolts were bright and scary! Just little systems that blew through were not so bad. You have heard that when you see the lightening count the seconds and when you hear the thunder each second you counted equals how many miles away the lightening is. For example, you see the lightening flash in the sky and you start counting, one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three and so on until you hear the crash of the thunder! If you counted three seconds and you heard the thunder clap, the lightening was three miles away. That didn’t always work where we lived. Sometimes the lightening struck in our driveway! We saw the clouds in the mountains and then we got the breeze and we could smell the rain in the air coming toward us. We would wait to hear thunder and if it was faint, we continued to play outside or work or whatever activity we were doing. If the thunder was louder, we scooted into the house quick! One day when this happened we looked out our kitchen window and ‘crack’ the lightening and thunder hit at the same time! We saw a puff of dust come up from our dirt-gravel driveway. The lightening hit 25 feet from the house!

My dad had built a shop and garage in the back yard. We had a beautiful pomegranate tree growing behind the shop. It was about 6 feet tall. The pomegranates would be the size of a baseball and some were softball size. They were so delicious to eat! We had a thunderstorm and the lightening and thunder cracked at the same time. My brother said he saw smoke coming from behind the shop. There was a perfect black zigzag from the top of the tree to the bottom. That tree never did grow the same after that. The fruit after that grew very small. There is a powerful amount of voltage from lightening. That’s why people are killed when they get hit.

My dad would tease about my mom being afraid of the sound of thunder. She would unplug the television and any small appliances. It was not uncommon for lightening to hit television antennas on rooftops. The charge would go through the television and it would blow out the screen. After she unplugged everything she went into her bedroom. My dad would say, “She’s dug a foxhole under her bed and she’s hiding in it! She’ll come out when the storm blows over.” She did not think that was very funny!

When I was married and just had Michelle at the time, I flew from Oregon down to El Paso, Texas. My parents had to drive 100 miles to get to the airport. It just happened that the afternoon I flew in there was a thunderstorm in the area. The pilot told us not to worry and that all planes were grounded with a lightening rod and we would be fine. From the air and looking out the little port window in the plane it was quite a show watching the lightening on the skyline. We landed safely and it was sunny and no rain in that immediate area. My mom looked a little bit pale. My dad told me that it was the thunderstorm and she was in a panic that our plane would get hit! We were fine.

The one thing I am still afraid of is strong windstorms. When your grandpa and I were married about one year we moved from New Mexico up to Oregon. He was in the United States Air Force and his enlistment was up and we moved back to Oregon where his parents lived. He was going to Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham, Oregon, which was about 35minutes away from where we lived. I was working at US Bank. One afternoon around 3:00p.m. the sky got ominous black and we heard on the radio that a tornado was in the area. We watched the sky out the big picture window at the front of the bank. One quarter of the sky was very black and a funnel shaped cloud filled that quadrant of the sky. We watched it move slowly from west to east. It skirted slowly behind some mountains and then off toward Vancouver, Washington. It was ‘very scary’ to watch as we did not know where it would touch down. Grandpa was at school and I worried he would be in it. We lived out in Clackamas where the black cloud was and I wondered if our mobile home park would be hit. It appeared it was not going to hit where we were at work in the bank. We were just so relieved and grateful it moved on.


We heard an hour later on the news that the tornado touched down in Vancouver, Washington, about one hour north of us. It had just missed Portland. It touched down on an elementary school where just half an hour earlier school had let out and thankfully nobody was in the building. It destroyed the school; only the walls were standing, as it was a brick building. How tragic that would have been if school had not let out. That happened about 37 years ago and today I am still uneasy when the clouds and sky turn ominous black. I watch to see if any tornado funnel formations are in the sky. That is an experience I shall never forget!

Doug & Ashley Guptill - They got married!

Doug & Ashley were married in the Columbia, South Carolina Temple on August 29th.

What a beautiful temple! The ceremony was so special. Douglas, like his brother David who was married 3 weeks earlier, had a hard time keeping his emotions in check. While the temple sealer was sealing them Doug's chin was trembling and he was fighting back his tears of joy. Ashley was smiling just as big and had tears running down her cheeks. Even the temple sealer was choked up. I know I was shedding happy tears!

I was so touched that both our sons were so emotionally touched and how much they love their wives. :o)

Ashley has a wonderful family and we enjoyed being with them so much. They were awesome! Everyone treated sweet little Kirsten like royalty. Ashley's Grandpa Glen Buckner bonded with Kirsten from the start. It was a very special experience for both of them. The first picture above is Ashley's family. She has young parents and they have six beautiful children! They are such a neat family! You just love them! Ashley was their first child to get married and Doug was our last. My to be so young again! :o)

Georgia and South Carolina are so beautiful! It was like we never left Oregon or Washington. The people down there are so friendly and genuine. We very much enjoyed our visit down there. I hope we can go back again sometime.

We have an OpenHouse we are hosting for Doug and Ashley this Saturday evening, so I'm pretty busy getting ready for that! The honeymoon couple get in this Friday evening. They went on a Carnival Cruise and hopefully won't be bothered with hurricane Hannah. They went from Miami through the Florida Keys and down to Cozumel, Mexico, a little island off the tip of Yucan, close to Cancun. We're excited to hear about there trip!