How Rude!!!

Although I guess it's nice to be remembered and/or asked to be included. Kristabel added me to one of those silly Seven Things...tag lists. It was pretty easy, too. I just followed along with the seven things Hanks Sims added to Kristabel's comment section, changing them a bit to apply to me.

I originally started this as a comment below Hank's entry. Then it occured to me that, if I post it here, I won't feel like I have to post anything else here today. So, here it is:

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1. I lived on a boat for about a week once. We took a cruise ship from the Atlantic side of Panama, thru the canal, north to Acapulco and then arrived in San Pedro. End of trip. It was a blast. I was around 11 years old at the time.

We'd moved back to the U.S. from Mexico back then and my mother chose it as a vacation. We flew to Mexico City, spent a few days and met with old friends. Then we took this little puddle jumper plane and stopped at all the Central American countries ( just to pick up and drop off passengers) until we got to Costa Rica where our cousins lived. We spent a week or two there then headed to Panama and our cruise. Neat trip.

2. I don't really have any useful job skills since my background is nearly all in security, law enforcement or the military and I'm too old to use any of them.

3. I was interrogated at junior high school by Detective Brent Bixler of the Tustin, CA Police Dept. This was in 1969 when I was thirteen. He arrested me for Possession of Dangerous Drugs. Back then, that was a big deal. Funny that I'd never even smoked pot at that point in my life.

They ended up reducing the charges to Possession of a Hypnotic Drug Without a Prescription- a misdemeanor. I spent two years on probation. That seemed like an eternity.

As an aside, in regards to something Kristabel mentioned: I too often suffer "panic attacks" when I'd smoke pot. That's one of the reasons I quit smoking the stuff. Not always, but often enough. I've heard the same thing from some others. It's not unusual.

4. Dream vacation for me would be heading back to some of the places we vacationed in Mexico when we lived there: Oaxaca, Mazatlan, Acapulco, and so on. Wouldn't do it though, even if we had the time and money. Too scary down there now with all the killings and nasty political goings- on.

Central America's fun, too, but wouldn't feel safe down there either. Maybe I'm just paranoid? Then again, I spoke to my brother a while back and he said he wouldn't feel safe in Mexico, either.

5. I have two years of College (C/R), but no degree because I didn't take some required courses, like Speech and a couple others.

In the early 80s I took and completed one of those silly correspondence courses on gunsmithing. You know, one of the ones those schools advertise in various magazines; Learn Gunsmithing At Home? Cost me a whole bunch of money (over $300, a sizable amount of money back then) and was pretty much worthless.

6. I've had two letters to the editor published in the Los Angeles Times and two and a half letters published in the San Francisco Chronicle. Pretty impressed with myself for that as I've read the SF Chron receives an average of 800 letters on a Monday but can only publish a few of them.

7. The only dead body I've ever seen, at least up close, was my fathers when he was in his casket. He died unexpectedly from what seemed to be a heart attack when we were living in Mexico. My sister told me years later my mother thought my father was killed by the CIA, or something along that line, because penicillin was found in his system and he was allergic to penicillin.

I was surprised to hear that, especially from sis as she's a few years younger than me. Then again, she spent much more time with my mother than I did. And, it actually wouldn't surprise me if there was some skullduggery going on there.

My father was general sales manager for A.B. Dick aka Ditto Inc., in Mexico City. They sold office equipment back in the '60s. From what I've read since then such people were often working in some way or another with various intelligence agencies.

We had cousins living in Costa Rica whose father worked for the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica. My father's family were quite the international bunch. I remember hearing him talk of some casual dealings with the CIA when he worked for the U.S. Embassy in Laos. Wouldn't surprise me at all if a few were full or part- time spies way back then.