Mr Pibbleton's Tales

So back in 2012, Cordova Alaska got around 18 feet of snow in one day.  A lot of people got snowed in, but we only lost one building and old abandoned warehouse, so we did pretty good on that score. Now as you might imagine, removing that massive amount of snow from your roof can be a bit tricky, especially with the ice buildup.

One individual of rare genius simply tied a rope to the top of a tree near his place, drew the rope across the roof and tied it to the hitch on a truck.  He drove the truck out so the rope cut into the ice and snow, then simply took a turn and cleared the roof off that way.  Some desperate people actually went so far as to shoot birdshot at their tin roofs in order to crack the ice, however my dad chose to go the route of subtlety in his dealings.

Seal bombs.

Seal bombs were sold to fishermen back in the day as a means of scaring seals and other aquatic mammals away from their nets without hurting them. However it quickly became apparent that they weren’t effective at all and were essentially small pieces of dynamite that kids kept on blowing stuff up with. Some laws were passed and while they weren’t technically illegal at the time, they were not legal to purchase or sell.

So my dad is up on the roof with a bag full of old seal bombs that were finally getting a utilitarian use(my oldest brother sending cans hundreds of feet up into the air with them was not a great contribution to astrophysics).  However they were rather old and one fuse was defective and burned out way to fast, my dad didn’t have time to throw it, instead he dropped it.  He held up one hand to shield his eyes and reflexively had the other hand down.  So the shockwave from the explosion did just a little skin damage and no doubt rung his ears pretty severely.  

The problem was the low hand was gripping the lighter he’d been using and the force of the blast was holding a lighter. The butane gas was compressed causing it to ignite and explode, blowing away half of his thumb. My father being a vietnam veteran, and an Alaskan woodsman with survival experience decided to induce vasoconstriction in his injured extremity to reduce blood loss.  So he stuck his hand in snow then mom got a towel to pack it around it.

One of my brothers is a vegan and when visiting him and his family, we went to a vegan restaurant.  Turned out this was the very first vegan restaurant that Guy Fieri had ever been to.  They even had an inspiring quote from him about their restaurant.

“This is the first vegan restaurant I’ve ever been to.” -Guy Fieri

"Tastes just like real meat eh?” said my vegan bigger bro.

“...Not really.”

He was determined to show me that vegan food could 100% replace meat in texture and flavor so a bit later he takes me to another vegan restaurant with “The Best Philly Cheesesteaks” This particular dining venue is in downtown Eugene and as I sat down at one of the outside tables, I couldn’t help but notice there was a wall with what looked like a massive poop stain.

Our food arrived and then a homeless guy came around the corner and sat down near the poop stain.  The Cheesesteak was alright, the “meat” a bit too sweat, but they managed to recreate the texture pretty good.  I conveyed this to my brother while the homeless guy started to shoot up with heroin in broad daylight in front of my nieces.

They had some tofu dishes which I thought were pretty good and while I was enjoying them the junkie got up and left, only to be replaced a few minutes later by another homeless guy with a backpack who started fiddling around with its contents next to the poop stain.

“Please don’t shoot up, Please don’t shoot up.” I thought to myself while trying the imitation fried chicken.

I used to work in the electrical equipment safety shop, inspecting any electronics that came out and maintaining equipment that we’d issue from storage. This meant on occasion we had to throw out old equipment for new stuff.  Often it was perfectly fine equipment or just missing one part that we had already ordered but it’d get thrown out regardless since people wanted to make sure we used up our budget.  Thus we had to throw out a power transformer.

Turns out it was so heavy that two guys couldn’t lift it over the metal frame it was stuck behind to get it on to a hand truck and the rest of the division was out doing some kind of exercise so we thought we’d wait for them to come back.  I got bored hanging around the office with nothing to do with the shop head so I took another crack at it. I braced my back against a wall and pushing it with my legs rolled it over the frame, onto the hand truck I had waiting. After securing it with rope I rolled it past the office door.

“How the hell did you get that out of there by yourself?” queried the shop head.

“Work smarter not harder!” said the man who was blissfully unaware of impending irony.

So I rolled that heavy ass transformer towards the ramps and I noticed something about the hand truck’s wheels as I turned towards the gently sloping first ramp which was right next to the much steeper second ramp to get off the ship.

The damn tires bulged as I turned.

“Maybe I ought to go back and get help with this... nah I’ll just take it slow.”

Gravity had other plans and I was unable to control its descent, merely slowing the rate of acceleration, the only person below me being an ensign lieutenant  

“Gang way!” 

He did not.

“Look out below!”

The situational awareness displayed was suboptimal.

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY BEFORE YOU FUCKING DIE!”

and so he did.

I barreled past the officer, while trying to hold it back.

“Hey, you ought to move slower, that’s dangerous!” he declared.

“I’m trying sir!”

“Well just slow it-HOLY FUCK!” he shouted as I wiggled it back and forth slightly shifting the weight and causing the tires to bulge once more.  At this point he started to help me slow it down and flagged a couple of other sailors to help assist, because the two of us alone weren’t doing it. After I got it to the docks and on level ground I didn’t need them to take it to the dumpster.

Of course this meant I had absolutely no way to get it in by myself since-

“Hey need a hand?” said a fork lift driver with impeccable timing.

“Why yes, yes I do.” and damn if he didn’t manage to pick up that transformer with one smooth motion and neatly transfer it to the dumpster.

When I returned to the office, the chief was talking to the shop head. “Yeah I hadn’t thought about it when I told you to do it but you’re gonna need at least four or five guys to get that power transformer out of there and to the docks.” The shop head looked past chief and at me as I walked through door. I nodded at him.

“Already done Chief.” He said.

“You two got it?”

“No just Pibbleton.”

So after the shootout the local crack dealers left the neighborhood and things were a bit quieter.  Sure, there was that guy who got into a shootout with the cops and had all those pipe bombs in his car and the occasional running gun battle on the streets but most of the stabbings and attempted murders resulted in very little in the way of deaths.

So I’m walking back from class and there’s this little old lady who lived just down the street from the crackhouse and she waves me over.  She’s got all these bags of fertilizer for her garden in the car and she needs help unloading them. Veggie gardens are pretty common in Alaska, while we get a ton of sunlight during the summer we don’t have much in the way of farmland so we have to ship in our fruits and veggies from outside the state and they’re not very fresh when they arrive.

Naturally I help the old lady out (she also gets me to move a birdbath) and she thanks me by giving me some fresh yellow squash and chives.

“I knew you’d be willing to help an old lady out with the heavy lifting.” She said with a sunny smile while giving me the vegetables. “You macho men are always willing to show off your muscles, especially for some fresh veggies.” Her face then grew sad and she said, “I miss those boys down there.” She said gesturing at where the drug dealers used to hang out. “They were such nice helpful young men.”

I wondered if she knew that some of their number had been taken out by rival dealers and if those-

“Still slinging crack is a dangerous game, but we all gots to get paid you know?”

Oh, she was totally aware, ok then.

...which be impressive if I didn’t live in Alaska. So I never saw much of anything going on there, I did take advantage of it though, like the time I wanted to get rid of a busted bicycle and just left it outside unlocked.  It was gone in under ten minutes. 

Anyhow, I was going to college nearby and it was a gorgeous spring day with delightful weather so I decided to get on my bike and take the slightly longer scenic route which would be going through a parks and bike trails.  So I’m leaning back on my seat enjoying the wind and sun and completely oblivious to what’s going on back on my street.

I complete my two hour class on WWII and head back home via the same route and there’s a message waiting for me on the answering machine.

“Are you ok? ARE YOU OK? CALL ME BACK AS SOON AS YOU CAN!” It’s my aunt, she called me a few minutes after I left my apartment, so I call her back on the landline.  Turns out there was a shootout in my neighborhood with the local drug dealers. Which was unfortunate because they had been nothing but polite when I walked past the crack house. The firefight involved multiple cars and was on my usual route to class.

“Oh wow at that intersection? I’m going to go check it out.”

“NO IT’S TOO DANGEROUS!”

“It’s been almost 3 hours, they’re definitely out of bullets by now and probably out of rocks too.”

So I hung up on my aunt, who would later insist that I went to investigate during the shooting and went into the hail of bullets and only claimed it was three hours later so my mom wouldn’t worry about me, then proceeded to the intersection.

So when it comes to my birthday, I’m not that particularly enthusiastic to begin with.  It’s close to Christmas so people often claim that gifts for me “are Christmas AND BIRTHDAY gifts.” and for some reason are confused when I tell them the birthday gift I got them was also a Christmas gift too.

“But my birthday isn’t anywhere near Christmas!”

“I know.” 

I’ve had fevers on my birthday, actually forgotten about them when I was in the navy and but they’re pretty unremarkable and hardly what I consider memorable, except for one.

I believe I was about 12 or so when my mom told me the devastating news.

“I’m too busy to bake a cake so if you want one tonight, you’ll have to bake it yourself.”

Now a lesser child might’ve protested or given up but as the youngest child in my family getting shorted was pretty normal for me. So I simply accepted and got to baking. Now I had baked cookies from scratch before and using store brought chocolate cake mix was absolutely no problem. There was a simple recipe for icing in the cookbook, but I had a peculiar flavored I preferred as a child.

Coffee.

As an ancient my childhood had no access to the world wide web and all its wondrous knowledge so if I wanted to make coffee flavored frosting, I’d need to consult a cookbook.  There were no such recipes to be found so I had to improvise.

It was simplicity itself to make the basic icing with powdered sugar, my three options were: brew some coffee and it add it to really thick icing, finely grind that folgers coffee, or mix in instant decaffeinated coffee and hope for the best. Time was running out so I made my choice, consequences be damned.

Now initially I didn’t make enough frosting so I had to make one more batch but it wasn’t quite thick enough so I made a third batch and the cake ended up being a wide variety of browns and a lot of people had their doubts about the edibility of the cake I had made.

Turns out it was god damn delicious and people were shocked at the simplicity of the recipe, I just stirred in some instant coffee and it came out perfectly.

So for everyone at home who wants the recipe. Make/buy icing, stir in instant coffee, then thank me for improving the quality of your life.

Bonus recipe for guacamole: take an avocado and mash it up.

So when I stopped teaching English in Japan and returned to America, things didn’t go quite as smoothly as one would hope. A lot went wrong on the way back, but I’m going to focus on one particular mix up in this trip.  The cheapest flight involved flying from Japan’s Narita Airport to Beijing before heading back to the states.  There was one teensey little problem.

My plane didn’t land in Beijing.

Instead it landed in some planned communist town where all the buildings were identical and all the streets were straight and at right angles. It was the pretty much the opposite of the sprawling chaotic Japanese roadways I’d grown accustomed to. So I get off the plane and I’m not at an international airport which is kind of a problem and I tried to get a transfer from the counter but uh, I got quickly escorted by the military to a small room with a steel table and a couple of folding chairs where I had to wait.

For like, three minutes at most, they were very quick and polite about things, I had printed out an itinerary and I gave it to a lieutenant and he said they’d get this straightened out quickly.  You see this was right after the Beijing Olympics had ended and everyone had to get some English training in but these guys figured they’d never get a chance to use it but lo and behold foreign tourist in trouble!

So various officers kept on coming in and asking me if I wanted a glass of water, how my day was going, if there was anything else they could do to make me more comfortable. So I get escorted to this Major who is standing in front of a small division and she explains that getting this straightened out is a high priority and they’ve got flights set up out of Beijing so I’ll be getting through with no delays, she then orders the division to turn right.  Asks me if there’s anything else they can do for me, then orders the division to march out. 

Yes, she was busy and in the middle of something but it turns out the People’s Liberation Army’s Ground Forces will make time for you.

“Oh I gave a copy of my itinerary to someone, if I could have that back, that’d be great.” 

It was returned to me while I was in the waiting area and I was on a flight straight to Beijing.  If I could google rate it my capture and interrogation, it’d be 5 stars would be detained again.

So one summer I get a job clearing a trail in Alaska. The trail had become way overgrown because it was past a recently repaired bridge that had fallen down in the Good Friday earthquake of 1964, so people didn’t get out there that often. It was a sixty some odd mile commute back to town so we stayed out there in an old military surplus tent.

Mostly of the crew was cutting small trees and saplings down with power tools but couldn’t be bothered to move the lumber. Since we got double pay for overtime I spent 10 hours a day five days a week picking up and throwing bundles of wood and the occasional tree.

I got pretty decent at it and after summer ended I went back to college Anchorage.  One day there was a massive windstorm and a tree had fallen across the trail I took to get to school.  Now I could just let someone else handle it but I was right there, so why not?

Turned out the job was trickier than I thought and the branches on the tree got entangled with other trees and my shirt got dirty. I had enough and just threw that uprooted tree back into the woods... knocking over an even bigger tree onto the path.

So after quietly whispering “...god damn it” I slowly and carefully moved that tree out of the way not knocking anything over.  I got a bit dirtier and I had to run otherwise I’d be late to class but I got the job done and done right, resolving to be more careful about throwing trees in the future.

Now the first time I took a crack at that pilgrimage in Shikoku there was high winds  one evening and when I entered the edge of a bamboo forest near one of the temples some pretty big bamboo trees had fallen across the path.  I could duck under them alright but when I tried picking them up they were pretty light... and throwable.

So I looked around real carefully making sure there weren’t any damaged trees in my intended trajectory and I chucked that bamboo, it flew a lot further than I thought and I hit the side of a hill causing a small avalanche which startled a dog that had been laying down below.  The dog scrambled away scared, but unhurt.

Once when I was a little child I journeyed far from Alaska to visit my mother’s people in the realm of the Sunlanders aka Southern California.  There we saw many wondrous sights, such as convenience stores, highways, buildings more than 3 stories high and reptiles as well as frogs!

Now frogs in Alaska have a declining population and a really high rate of physical deformities, probably due to all the pollution that gets brought up from outside the state via the jet streams.  One thing we definitely don’t have is big ass bullfrogs and my brother Louis, who loves animals, happened to catch a tadpole. Naturally he wanted to keep it as a pet and since it’s just one tadpole, how much trouble could it possibly cause? 

So it was placed inside a fishbowl to be brought on the plane, because this was the 80′s and boy things were different back then. He had absolutely no difficulties with holding that fishbowl on the car ride to the airport or getting that tadpole through security. However it was on the final leg of the journey that a nice lady sitting next to my brother inquired as to what kind of fish it was he had in the bowl.

Apparently her leaning over the bowl made the tadpole a little bit nervous and it was at this point we discovered it had grown legs during the trip.

So the tadpole jumps out of the bowl and runs amuck on the plane, stewardesses and small children crawled about searching for it as it hopped amongst the under seat storage.  The stewardesses valiantly tried to keep the flight calm while the children gleefully spread misinformation because imagination is more important than facts at that age.

So while I was in Japan I checked out their UFO catchers AKA crane games and found a lot of them to be rigged. Some will have it so that the crane swerves to the side when it drops, or twists or if it picks up the object easily enough, but will inexplicably snap open once it’s reached all the way up.  Others are too weak to pick up the object and some will pick it up and carry it just fine, but there’ll be pegs in the drop hole that prevent you from getting it.

Then you got those weird ones that are knife based and that just seems wrong to me. I’m sure in theory you could cut a strap with a knife and drop the prize through a hole but it was just too weird for me.

So back in the day when I was teaching English over in Japan, I taught a wondrous variety of students, ages ranging from four to seventy four. Some of my classes were for elementary school students, some preschool, high schoolers, the retired, company classes, trade school classes but the rowdiest classes were the two engineering classes. 

They were kind of terrible, often late to class, spent a lot of time drawing penises and were very easily frustrated by the lessons. To be fair I felt that a lot of the guidelines and restrictions on how I taught the subject matter were preventing people from understanding.  It had to be 100% English, no Japanese explanations so I wasn’t allowed to use examples from their own language to explain how English did something really similar which could cause a lot of confusion. I did do some extra lessons for free which really helped with the course material, but a more experienced teacher could’ve done a better job with what we had to deal with.

Both sides were frustrated, but attendance was pretty much mandatory, however one of my worst students, let’s just call him Takeshi, from the first engineering group skipped class one day. I made a note of it but that’s really all I was intending to do.  However after I finished copying the materials for the second class, with a few extras just in case I decided to stop at the 7-11 on the way to work. As i walked up to the doors, I saw Takeshi at the counter.

I quickly walked backwards and around a corner where he couldn’t see me (they have a LOT of windows on their convenience stores). I ducked down and went through the materials, organizing a personal stack for Takeshi. There weren’t any other customers inside as I entered and I just strolled casually up to him and handed him the papers like it was the most normal thing in the world.

I then went over the lesson with him, explained some things that people had found difficult in class and went over it with him in Japanese (I can only do this off the clock I explained).  Got him to agree to keep on showing up. Never once explained how I found him or why I had a lesson plan ready for him and just left him to stew on those mysteries. Didn’t buy anything, just walked out the door like my sole intent was to deliver this lesson.