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After my last blog post, two different people asked to hear more about my old house in El Reno. I could’ve sworn that I’ve written about it before, but a search of the blog didn’t turn up anything so … here you go.

In August of 1993, after having attended classes at a local community college for two years, I packed up all my belongings and moved 60 miles west to Weatherford, Oklahoma. There, I moved in with Susan and enrolled at South Western Oklahoma State University (SWOSU). Susan’s mom had purchased a mobile home in Weatherford which Susan, myself, and a third roommate all shared. In the spring of 1994, Susan and I had both had enough of school so we dropped out and towed the mobile home 60 miles back east to Oklahoma City. As I mentioned earlier this week, once we moved back to OKC we had a rough time finding jobs, and the two of us were pretty hungry and miserable for several months. We lived in the mobile home the rest of 1994 and most of 1995 — in fact, we were still living there in August of 1995 when the two of us got married.

Susan’s mom received a sizable inheritance in 1994, and could often be found spending it at local auctions. One day in the fall of 1995, Susan returned home after attending an auction with her mom and informed me that she had “just bought a house!”

And actually, that wasn’t accurate — they had bought two houses: 202 S. Barker and 206 S. Barker, both in El Reno, Oklahoma (about 15 minutes west of where we were living). The financial part of the deal was pretty straight forward. Susan’s mom paid $75k for both houses. If we wanted one, it would cost us $37,500, which we would pay off (interest free) over the next ten years. After living in a mobile home for two years, we decided we were ready to become home owners. How bad could it be?

(Did you ever see the movie “The Money Pit”?)

Front of 202 S. Barker.

If I remember correctly, the house was around 3,000 square feet. It was built in 1880, 27 years before Oklahoma was a state. Inside, the house had been divided up into five separate apartments. Four of the five apartments had their own kitchen, bathroom, living room, and bedroom(s); the fifth apartment was a big studio room. Two of the apartments were part of the original house; the other three had been added on at some point. At one point I think we counted 14 rooms (excluding bathrooms).

Here’s a funny story I had actually forgot about. When Susan and I moved in, there were two girls — twin sisters, I think — still living in the house. When we asked them to leave, they told us no. I think we took ownership of the house in the middle of October, and the twins told us that they had paid rent through the end of October. Now of course they hadn’t paid us any rent (their old landlord was dead — thus the auction). So for two weeks, we had a couple of strangers also living in the house. Due to the layout of the house with its separate apartments, it wasn’t as awkward as it sounds. When the twins finally left, they left behind a ton of furniture and belongings that Susan and I ended up moving out to our shed. We had to hound those girls’ parents to come get their crap before we took it to the dump. That was an odd experience.

Rear of 202 S. Barker.

At first, the idea of having such a large house was pretty exciting. We joked about having a “dirty clothes room” and a “shoe room” and different rooms to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner in, but we quickly learned things were a lot simpler if you didn’t spread your stuff all through a giant house. Not long after we moved in we migrated to the “side” apartment (the most modern of the five) and lived there. There were two bedrooms (one of which I used for a computer room), a living room, a dining room (that I turned into an arcade), and a bathroom with a claw foot bathtub and no shower. Actually, all the bathrooms were like that. Five bathrooms, five claw foot bathtubs, and no showers.

Makeshift arcade — Mat Mania and Championship Street Fighter.

Let’s talk about the interior. For starters, there wasn’t a three-prong outlet to be found in that place. For the arcade games and my computer, I had to plug things into a power strip with the ground prong pulled off. The living room had gas pipes still on the wall — the house was originally built to accommodate gas lanterns in the home for lighting, instead of electricity. The one time I peeked in the attic I saw electrical wires where the insulation had fallen off. On one wall that needed repair, we found newspapers from the 1930s stuffed inside.

And then there was “the door” incident. For whatever reason, the rear apartment had been completely sealed off from the rest of the house. The only way to enter the rear apartment was to go outside and come back in a different door. I decided that was stupid, so I decided to “make a doorway”. I’m not sure what tools most people use to “make a doorway”, but I used a steak knife. I sawed and sawed until I had what essentially looked like a giant mouse hole from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Inside the hole I found that the whole house had been insulated with straw. Seriously, one dropped match could have incinerated the place.

Tune in tomorrow for Part Two of “The El Reno House”!

In the spring of 1995, Susan and I had just purchased our first real house — a disaster of a place that probably should have been condemned. The house was built in 1880 (27 years before Oklahoma was even a state), and to this day we thank god that place didn’t explode, burn down, or simply cave in while we lived there.

One night, shortly after I purchased my four-track audio recorder, my buddy Jeff came over and the two of us spent then evening writing and recording silly songs — the most memorable of which was “Mad Melon,” a silly little ditty dedicated to the bottle of Mad Melon (watermelon schnapps) we were drinking at the time. The song went like this:

“Mad Melon, Mad Melon,
It keeps you yellin’ cuz it’s Mad Melon.
Mad Melon, Mad Melon,
How much we’ve had there’s no tellin’,
Mad Melon, Mad Melon,
Drink and Drive and you’ll be a felon,
Mad Melon, Mad Melon,
It’s advocated by Bob Dylan.”

Not many people can rhyme “melon” and “Dylan”, but I pulled it off.

After Jeff left that night, the bottle of Mad Melon got packed back up in the cupboard. In the fall of 1996, Susan and I moved to Spokane, Washington. The bottle went with us. In the spring of 1998 we moved back to Oklahoma; the bottle came home with us. We stayed with my dad for a month before closing on our old house in Yukon. After living there for three years, we moved to the house we’re at now in 2002. Somehow, this nearly empty bottle of watermelon schnapps made it through all those trips.

Jeff came over last night and while digging through the liquor cabinet, back in the back I found that same bottle of Mad Melon we started on 15 years ago. We couldn’t decide if watermelon schnapps could go bad or not, so we decided to go ahead and drink it.

Talk about nursing a drink!

Mad Melon: Advocated by Bob Dylan.

Due to some unscheduled building maintenance, my co-workers and I have been recently displaced. Last week I sat in four different rooms on two different floors. We’re settled now in a temporary location. Since it’s temporary, I only brought the bare essentials with me. A guy who sits near me brought … his fridge.

It’s a small dorm-sized fridge, and the minute I saw it I thought, “what could I put in there?” And the answer seemed obvious — a severed head. (A fake one, of course.) So last night after work the kids and I went to Party Galaxy, who has already begun preparing for Halloween. The greeter at the front of the store gave the kids some balloons and then asked if she could help us find anything and I said, “Yeah, I’m looking for a severed head,” and the lady said, “I think they’re on aisle 14.”

So the kids and I set out and we find the heads and they’re $25.99, which I decided was too much for a stupid joke — but near the severed heads were severed limbs and body parts, and it turns out you can get a foot for much less ($7.99). We head to the checkout lanes and the cashier asks us if we found everything okay and I hold up the foot and she laughs.

Yesterday morning I got to work early, and when my co-worker got in and opened up his fridge, he found this:

When he first saw it, he thought his ice tray had overflowed and that it was an oddly-shaped clump of ice. Remind me to never borrow a cup of ice from this guy.

The foot soon found its way back to my cube. You would be amazed (or not) at how many stupid foot jokes there are. “Need a hand? How about a foot?” “Check out my new ruler. It’s a foot long!” “My wife always said I had two left feet.”

Feel free to add your own.

These things belong to the Vegetable Plant. Please do not touch them.

There was a time when computers weren’t nearly as user friendly as they are today. Some might say they aren’t even all that user friendly today, but compared to the days of old, we’ve traveled a long way in a short amount of time. As an self-appointed ambassador of technology if you will, I am constantly trying to get my friends and relatives use high-tech solutions whenever possible “because they’re so much easier” … however, every now and then something comes along that sets my tech relations back a few steps. Folks, meet the Garmin 200.

The Garmin Nuvi 200 is pretty much the bottom of Garmin’s GPS line. I used to own a nicer model (the 240w), which someone else also thought was nicer and removed it from my truck for me. I’ve become so reliant on my GPS that when the other one disappeared, I went to Best Buy and bought this one (the 200) the same weekend. I paid about $60 for it, on sale.

For the most part, the Nuvi 200 works like it’s big brother. However, the maps are two years out of date now and I’m starting to see a lot of roads in real life that aren’t on the GPS. This is where the fun begins.

The Nuvi 200 has around 950 meg of free space available for maps. Garmin’s latest map update is about 1.4 gig, or 1,400 meg. That means that Garmin’s new maps won’t fit on my Garmin GPS. I tried deleting a bunch of files off the GPS (do I really need it to display Hungarian or talk to me in Mandarin?) but that didn’t help at all. Fortunately there is a solution. The Nuvi 200 has an SD slot on the side. All I needed to do is buy an SD card and install the maps on to it.

I downloaded some maps and tried copying them over to the SD card, but it doesn’t work that way. After giving up on that, I decided to buy the new 2010 maps directly from Garmin. Brace yourself for this one. They’re $70. To download. New maps for my two year old $60 GPS cost $70 to download. Are you kidding me?

Obviously I’ll be buying a new GPS and selling this one on Craigslist. Anyone need a GPS with outdated maps on it?

… I take things apart, fix them, and put them back together.

(Although to be fair, sometimes I take things apart and then they never work again. Hey, nobody’s perfect. This one, however, works as good as new.)

In the Spring of 1994, Susan and I had been dating for less than a year when we decided to drop out of college and take our now infamous road trip “out west”. We spent a week visiting Carlsbad Caverns, the Grand Canyon, Meteor Crater, Old Tucson, and a bunch of other things. We returned home broke and unemployed college dropouts. Prior to our road trip we had been living in a mobile home in Weatherford, Oklahoma, but using money borrowed from my Dad, we moved the mobile home from Weatherford back to Oklahoma City. At that point we became broke, unemployed college dropouts in debt.

For a month or two, it looked like we might not make it. Jeff paid our electric bill one month, just to keep us going. When the air conditioner died, we borrowed two box fans and put one near the front door and one near the back door just to keep (hot) air flowing through. Susan has always had a knack in the kitchen for making “something out of nothing”, but once there was literally nothing left to eat in the house, we began raiding my dad’s cupboards on occasion, pilfering packages of Ramen Noodles and jars of peanut butter.

That same summer, Susan’s mom decided to open her own BBQ Restaurant and hired Susan and me to work for her. My first job was to ride around town in the back of Liz’s convertible in a pig suit in the middle of a hot Oklahoma summer, waving to people and holding a sign that read, “Kiss the Pig at Liz’s BBQ.” It makes me chuckle when I hear people, especially teens, telling me what kind of jobs they will and won’t do. I suspect may of the pickier ones haven’t spent an entire summer without air conditioning eating Ramen Noodles …

To get more business, Liz decided that Liz’s BBQ needed a sign. She asked me if I could paint a sign and I said yes. In reality I didn’t know anything about painting signs, but I’m pretty sure I got a free plate of BBQ out of the deal. Liz bought some paint and a 4×8 sheet of plywood which I propped up on milk crates in my dad’s garage, and I painted a sign.

The sign was then mounted on the side of Liz’s smoker, a giant of a machine that could smoke 24 slabs of ribs at once. Liz’s boyfriend Joseph tended to the actual cooking of the meat, while Susan and I ran the inside of the restaurant. There was no prestige involved — all we cared about was (A) working, and (B) working at a place that served food.

The BBQ business soon moved from the southeast side of OKC over to Yukon, and the sign moved with it. The business didn’t make it long over there, and I couldn’t tell you why. Later that summer Susan got a job at Caremark, and in August I got hired by Best Buy. Our BBQ days were over. When the restaurant closed its doors, the smoker ended up parked back down on Liz’s farm. It got moved down there in 1994, and it’s still sitting there today.

This past week, Liz sold the farm. She’s got 30 days to clear the property, and that includes the smoker ($3,500, you bring a set of tires and a truck to haul it). While Susan was walking the property looking for any old keepsakes worth keeping, I spotted the following piece of rotting trash, ready to be hauled off to the dump.

According to a recent local news story, the cost of vending decals is about to triple in Oklahoma. Vending decals are the stickers you see on arcade games and jukeboxes and pool tables. Each sticker is good for a year, and is required to be placed on “every coin-operated music or amusement device that requires a quarter or more.”

Currently, a sticker costs $50. Last month, the Oklahoma House and Senate passed a bill that will triple that cost, to $150 per machine. Let’s say for example a laundromat has three machines inside for kids to play. That’ll be $450/year, just in vending stickers. Since most locations split the take 50/50 with machine owners, those three machines will need to be played 3,600 times a year ($450*4*2) just to cover the cost of the stickers. That of course doesn’t include repairs, upkeep, or, you know, any profit.

According to the story on KFOR:

Senator Mike Johnson’s name appears on this bill so we contacted him to ask about the sudden increase. He said lawmakers simply had to come up with new revenue to make up for the shortfall in the state budget and this is one of the ways they’re doing it.

If anything, I suspect 2/3 of the machines you see out “in the wild” will soon disappear. The state will make the same amount of money (or less), and the biggest losers will be people like me who always keep a few spare quarters in their pocket just in case they happen across an old arcade game. Places like Celebration Station and Chuck E. Cheese probably won’t close down, but if their operating costs triple, you can bet that increase will get passed on to you.

Is this a great state or what? Sometimes, not so much.

IntroComp is the only competition I’m aware of for unfinished games (specifically, text adventures). Each year for the past eight years, programmers have submitted incomplete versions of their games to be judged. Judging is performed by peers, which could mean you!

Every IntroComp entry is available for download, and once you play them, you can vote on them. Now I know what you are saying — how much will it cost me to download and play incomplete text adventure (now referred to as “interactive fiction”) games? The answer is, it’s free! If you used to play or dabble in text adventures back in the day, this is a great way to both play some new games and give some hard-working programmers some much needed feedback. The writers of these games cannot collect their prizes until the games are finished, so this really helps them out.

As a bonus, playing these games will no doubt get you in the mood for Get Lamp, Jason Scott’s upcoming documentary about text adventures.

Link: IntroComp

After 40 years of dishing up weird and wacky tunes, Dr. Demento’s radio show is coming to an end. I suppose it’s ironic that I read about this in the Tulsa World, as Oklahoma’s Clear Channel stations dropped Dr. Demento’s show years ago (which, I suppose, is the problem).

Back in high school I used to listen to the good Doctor Sunday nights on 107.7 (KXRO), and I remember being disappointed when they quit airing the show. According to the official website, there are (er, were) only six radio stations still carrying the show. Everyone interested in still listening to the show (like myself) has been forced to download recordings of the broadcasts via the Internet.

And speaking of the Internet, that’s where he’s heading. According to DrDemento.com, for $2/week (good luck with that), the Doctor’s demented followers will be able to get new Internet-based episodes of the show. I didn’t feel bad at all about downloading recordings of radio broadcasts, but I won’t download them if he’s selling them.

Growing up, we had a couple of silly song compilations (like Goofy Gold) and I have several of Dr. Demento’s CD compilations (yes, originals) that he’s released throughout the years that both I and my kids enjoy (Susan, not so much).