Friday, November 29th
We slept in a bit, but finally pried ourselves out of bed. I started in to clearing off the walls of Merlin’s workroom so that I could mount a tool rack. But when I took down an old post, lo and behold what did I find but a wall safe hidden behind it! I reported this to Lois, but she hadn’t been aware of it and didn’t have either a key or the combination to get in. She tried some of the obvious combinations, but no luck. So we all discussed what to do about the safe and what might be in it while we drove in to meet Phyllis and Bill at the White Fox Den in Burlington for breakfast.
This year, they arrived from the Rainbow Motel across the street before we arrived from the dome, but politely waited for us to get there before ordering, so we could all eat together and, of course, talk. We continued the family conversations back at the dome, and Lois finally decided to let Jake crack the safe. Jake hacksawed through some hinges with over an hour of tedious work, and then used the “manly crowbar” to pry the pins out of the hinges. We finally had the inner box in our hand, but it still required a key. Jake just used a small screwdriver and a bent paper clip to open it, but he did it so fast I couldn’t even observe how he worked that trick. You never know when you might have to pick a lock! We looked on intently as Bill finally opened it up, but alas the safe was empty and our dream of hidden treasures was shattered. It really looked as if it had never been used, and maybe Merlin forgot about it as well as forgetting to tell Lois about it!
After all that excitement, we had leftovers for lunch and talked some more until Phyllis and Bill left to go home and Patience and Jake left to visit her father, meeting Tony and Dawn there. Lois, Monika, and I walked to Bohners Lake and back just to stretch our legs and get some fresh air, after which we attacked several boxes of old vinyl records. Lois settled on a system of stacks for oboe music and contradance records, which were definite keeps, and then dividing miscellaneous classical music into definite keep, probably keep, probably not keep, and definitely get rid of. We, of course, carefully sorted through the “get rid of” stack to find records that appealed to us. That stack was further whittled down after the others returned from visiting their father and had dinner with us.
When Patrick had finished his nap, we played with him for a while and talked some more with the folks before turning in early—I was anticipating a long, hard drive on the morrow. I showed the Thanksgiving pictures on the computer and demonstrated how to fix problems with the pictures like red eye or extraneous objects using the photo shop software. For me it was routine, except for 5 people staring at me while I did it, but for them it seemed to be interesting. I downloaded a couple of pictures for Dawn and we then joined the others for a final evening of conversation.
Tony told us about his new working arrangement with the university and his hopes for taking more time off in the future now that he is no longer committed to a private practice. He has to work at least 4,000 “ROV”s per year, but that looked like an easy mark since he had worked 10,000 ROVs in just the first half of this year. We calculated that he only had to work about 1/5 of the hours he worked before, or about 8 hours a week, so I kidded him about what he would do with all that spare time. He said he was considering buying a motor home and going camping with Patrick. In fact, he said he had his eye on an old Winnebago, a “Brave” model which is moderate-sized (as opposed to the typical “gigantic” or “enormous” Winnebagos). It will be interesting if Tony takes up the rather low-key hobby of camping, but I found out he hasn’t completely changed as Dawn mentioned he also wants to get back into racing his Buell motorcycle. Copyright 2002 by Robert W. Holt