Happy Sunday morning to ya. It's nice and cool here this morning, but it's cozy and warm on the couch all wrapped in my shawl. I love mornings like this. I always thought I was more of an afternoon/early evening sort of person, but as I get older I'm beginning to feel like I might be becoming more of a morning person. It's very serene here in the mornings, usually. Especially weekend mornings. Bea is kind of crazy a little bit, but still, the street isn't crazy busy with traffic and joggers and things. It's easy to sit on the front porch and read or drink hot chocolate and look out the window. I like mornings a lot more than I used to.
However, yesterday morning was less quiet than normal because my neighbors' truck was broken into and the police were around for the report. It's difficult to say what happened, except that my neighbor has a truck that he likes to work on and someone broke the lock on the passenger door and took something from the truck very early Saturday morning. The backs of the houses on my block and the block behind me all have a shared alley between them. But there are very few neighbors who actually park their cars back there. I let my neighbors park one of their cars in my little gravel driveway and they park the truck he works on in their driveway. It doesn't appear that anybody messed with the car that was parked in my driveway, because the policeman was only looking at the truck. So...I guess there was just something the thief really wanted in the truck. From experience, I know that people mess with cars around here. We park on-street mostly and people get bored and wander the streets late at night and before you know it, things just happen. People might wander through the alley from one end of the block to the other, but I'm not feeling like calling the cops every time I happen to see someone wandering the alley from now on, you know? I feel more like, if you don't want people taking things from your vehicle, don't leave stuff in the vehicle that they'd want to take. And on the plus side, at least they didn't break the window to get into the truck? No glass to clean up, at least. It does feel bad to be the victim of a break-in, whether they take anything or not.
Mizzou barely held on to win against Arizona State last night. I thought they'd for sure give up the entire game in the last minute or so, but they managed to hang on and intercept a pass at the last minute. Mizzou likes their dramatic endings. During parts of the game I was reading old letters that my dad has between my Grandpa and Grandma during WWII. I want to get the letters better organized and cleaned up and I started to look through them a bit. They're really great. They run from 1943-45 and we have most of the letters my Grandpa sent home, and many letters my Grandma wrote to him. They include the birth of my Uncle Paul and how my Grandma was trying to take care of the baby by herself. My Grandpa was a glider pilot and my dad always said that he never remembered him speaking much about the war or what he saw. He was in the Battle of the Bulge and then part of the occupying forces in Germany, so he didn't get to come home nearly as early as he had hoped he could. But, early on, my Grandpa tries to write to my Grandma about what he was seeing and how people were dying and she tells him not to write that to her anymore because she couldn't handle it. So, maybe part of why he never talked about it was because she was never comfortable with hearing the details or something? I don't know. But there are funny parts of the letters, like the first Christmas in 1943 when my Grandpa was supposed to get a furlough and then ended up not getting it and my Grandma was so disappointed and wrote him a letter about that, but the next morning she got up and wrote another letter filled with all of her ideas of what he should tell his commanding officers to get them to give him his furlough. Her main suggestion was to tell him that there were two mice in the basement that were freaking her out and that if he didn't get home soon, she was going to let out the biggest squeal and scare the neighbors half to death. She also had plenty of ideas of how to solve the war. And later, when my Grandpa was in Belgium and Luxembourg just after the Battle of the Bulge, he writes over and over hinting to her to send him a certain kind of shampoo. And he hints and hints for nearly a month for this shampoo until, by the end of the month, the letter ends with a postscript entirely made up of 'Send me shampoo. Send me shampoo. Send me shampoo. Send me some Fitch's shampoo.' He had hinted earlier on when he was in England about how he'd like a bottle of Coca Cola and a few weeks later in another letter he wrote, he mentions he got it and wonders how she found a bottle to send to him. So, most of his hints seemed to work out, but I do wonder if he ever got the shampoo he wanted. I haven't read every single letter yet. Some are from Great Uncles and Great Aunts as well. It is interesting to read the letters after so recently having read so many Civil War letters. Lots of similarities, but these are interesting because I know the people involved this time and I can go to Google and look up the houses that are being mentioned and see what the neighborhoods look like now.
The 1940 census helps, too because you can go and look at the names on the census and see what sorts of families made up the neighborhood at the time. My Grandparents didn't get married until after 1940, but still, the neighborhoods were similar. I was proud of my Grandma, who is listed on the 1940 census as being a single woman of 29, head of household, living in a duplex and working as a power machine operator in a dress factory. There's something very cool to me about being independent like that and having your independence show up on a national document like the census. It might seem silly, but it made me really proud to have a Grandma that went off on her own for a bit and didn't just stay at home until she was married. There's nothing wrong with doing that, but I feel proud when I see women (in the past, especially) who did go out and do their thing on their own. Who am I kidding? I still feel that way... In fact, I remember being very happy when the 2010 census came to my house because I knew that I'd be part of that sort of a thing now. I'll be listed as a single woman head of household on the 2010 census and no matter what happens later in life, for that moment in time, I'm recorded as a woman of 25 who had herself together enough to live alone and support herself in a single-family house in 2010. Booyah. Even if I never have kids who someday look me up on the census, maybe my neighbors' descendants or those of the family who I bought the house from will someday look it up and see me, being young and doing my thang in 2010 and feel proud of me? Or maybe not. But, I still do. Now I just hope they don't lose this census in a fire or something.
I also found an old hard drive of mine that had a bunch of pictures from highschool-college and Texas on it and I was looking through those. Lots of music on there from that era, too! It got me listening to a lot of stuff again. Good stuff that I'd forgotten about. Eve 6 has been playing like crazy around here lately. "Promise", "Jetpack", "Tongue Tied", "Inside Out"... Man, that band was so good. I don't think they ever had a bad song, even though some of their songs didn't make huge waves in radioland. This one did, though! I always loved this video, too because it fit the song so well, I thought. Aw, Eve 6:
One more, eh? Because they were awesome:
Then, some songs I haven't re-discovered because they've never left my mind, but when looking for a video to share on here, I ran across the video of "All the Small Things" and I totally forgot how awesome it was! Blink spoofed the boyband/pop star wave of corny videos and I had forgotten how hilarious it was:
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