The Pilver

The title of this post does not make sense.  I don’t know how else to phrase it.  Shortly after high school was over for me I began to feel nostalgia about nearly everything.  Toys, food, television shows.  Everything was better back  in the day.  I enjoyed my childhood and I missed things from it.  All the while the things I was experiencing then, roughly in my 20’s, I am becoming nostalgic for now.

I think I happened to hit adulthood at a crazy, crazy time.  The internet was a baby, cell phones were seemingly for the rich, and social networking was basically non-existent. My twenties are over and I am now a wife/mom/blah.  And in ten years I am going to long for these days.  I know it.  But now I want to talk about those days.  Here are the top 7 nostalgic things for which I didn’t think I’d be nostalgic.

7. 10-10 numbers

Long distance calls used to be expensive.  You could end up paying over a quarter a minute to talk to someone in the next state or even county.  But viola!   Along came 10-10 numbers to save us all from ridiculous fees.  Of course, when free long distance via cellular companies came along, 10-10 numbers made a quiet exit.

6. AIM

There are a million ways to send an instant message or chat on the internet.  The mother of all those ways was AOL Instant Messaging.  I always have my account logged in to this day. But many years ago there were dozens of people with whom I am ‘buddies’ with who would be signed in as now there are a small handful.  I think facebook chat overtook the AIM scene.   This is part of the hate in my love/hate relationship with facebook.

5. Snake

Back to old cell phones.  Just about the year 2000 people began to use cell phones in astronomical numbers.  Prior, as was mentioned, they were too expensive for just anyone.  The phones themselves were boring screens with boring games, like snake.  My trusty Nokia was as sturdy as a rock boasted only snake as far as gaming went.  So I played that stupid game whenever I needed to kill boredom.  But alas, the game was more boring than standing in line at the DMV.

4. Texts

I used to love texts.  Sometimes I still do.  But now they seem to be used in place of phone calls.  A simple thirty second conversation has been replaced by fifteen minutes of back and forth messages limited at 140 characters.  I want to get back to the place where texts were exciting and surprising.

3. MySpace

Haters gonna hate, but MySpace was, for me at least, the original “Where you been?”   Facebook may be the king daddy of social networking now, but only five years ago you hadn’t used it unless you were a college coed.  I’ll never delete my MySpace account because I love it so.  Also, I was reacquainted with Mr. Pilver via MySpace.

2. Fast Food

This may be more me than you.  I don’t eat fast food any longer.  Partially because I have educated myself with the ingredients of the products most fast food establishments serve and partially because there is not much fast food around.  When you go without McD’s for a year, and then attempt to enjoy a burger from the joint, you feel as though you are gnawing on a Styrofoam bun with slime in the middle.  I have so many fond memories of Happy Meals and apple pies so I can’t hate and only hate them.  We had a good run, Ronald, but it’s over.

1. XE

I stole that photo, yeah.

It’s eerie that I began this blog two days ago and then yesterday Matt, the master of all webmasters, decided to end XE.  If you don’t know what XE is, don’t ask.  But good lawd, I spent an embarrassing amount of hours on that site reading and posting and making great friends.  I’m nostalgic for a good advent calender or a SNT already.  Giant Ape Juice will always mean something to me.

Thirteen years ago I took a trip down the Oregon coast.  I saw the ocean, seals, and plenty of touristy goodness.  Most importantly, I saw the Goonies house.  The Goonies is a film that most in my generation regard as a classic family movie. It’s also a timeless flick, and my ten-year-old loves it now as well.  Upon returning from my trip I was anxious to develop the film in my camera and was devastated when none of the pictures turned out.  This, of course, being a problem pre-digital camera.

A few weeks ago my family ventured back to Astoria, OR and I was determined to secure a picture of myself in from of the Goonie’s house.  But I also got more…

Since my last visit, a sign has been put in place welcoming those fans of the movie wishing to see the house.  There were about six other people there at the same time we were.

Success!  And not only did I get a picture of me and The Max in front of the house, you can also see the current owner apparently walking out of a hole in the wall.  He was super friendly, which was great because I am not certain I would love having people in front of my house all day taking pictures.  I asked Max to do the “truffle shuffle” for me in front of the house while I took a picture, and he refused.  Max then asked the owner of the house to do the truffle shuffle and he only laughed, which was great because that was embarrassing.

Remember in the opening scene, when Chunk pressed a milkshake onto a window and spilled it everywhere while he was watching the police chase?  This is that window.

We didn’t have time to go inside and re-create the scene, next time!

Finally we went to the beach where the Truck race happened in the beginning of the film.  This location is in Cannon Beach, roughly twenty miles from Astoria.  Those rocks in the background are called “Haystack Rock.”  It’s a gorgeous beach, even in the dead of winter.

There you have it.  It looks a bit different without a hundred 4x4s from the 1980’s.  The Max decided while we were at the beach to go swimming, in his clothes.

This kid is a bit nutty 🙂

I went on a road trip recently, saw plenty of wonderful things. I don’t usually buy many souvenirs on vacation and this trip was no different. I did buy a toaster.

It’s a Farberware 295, thanks for asking. Looked on ebay and these spiffy model will catch up to fifty bucks. All the elements work perfectly. I know because today I tested it and Mr. Pilver announced, “It smells like an antique store is burning down!”

I still love my toaster.

Last year my son, The Max, created a song complete with  choreography for Valentine’s Day.  Something happened to him between last year and now, he’s become too cool.  I guess that’s what happens at ten years old.

If it were possible to hug, kiss, and say ‘I love you’ too much to your kids I would be an offender.  Every day when Max leaves and when he comes home I do all three of those things.  He obliges me, though he behaves as though he hates the mush.

Last night, at Cub Scouts, the boys made Valentine’s cards for family members.  Here’s mine:

Sweet, simple, he forgot the silent ‘e’.

Here’s the inside:

I love you too, crazy boy.

This weekend the Pilver family crammed into the car and drove a couple hours to my nieces birthday party.  She celebrated at a bowling alley complete with an arcade and roughly 74 screaming kids.  I like bowling alleys, what’s not to like?  There’s bowling, which is fun even if you are as terrible as I am.  You can always find gobs of junk food.  One rum and coke served is roughly the equivalent of seven rum and cokes and they charge you two dollars.  They have an arcade!

I was pumping quarters into the skee-ball machine, hogging it from all the little kids with big patient eyes when Mr Pilver came up to me and told me he had to show me something.  There was a Terminator Game:

Here we have a gruesome face and an image of a gun, pointed directly at my face.  Now, in my best Crocodile Hunter voice I’ll say, “Let’s have a closah luk!”

I severely doubt many parents hand their kids a pile of tokens and remind them to only play the non-violent games.  It’s basically a frenzy of running from game to game and plopping the tokens in and grabbing tickets and moving on as quickly as possible.   But, why bother having the stickers when they really mean nothing at all?  Although, in reality, skee-ball can become highly violent when you are playing next to the young boy with bad aim who just inhaled twenty-four ounces of Mountain Dew and a few packs of Starburst.

Justin Timberlake apparently is working for MySpace.  He is trying to get it going in a new direction, being as it is an unused social networking site at this point.  Thankfully I never deleted my account and I can zip back there any time I want, which at this point is never. But forget about MySpace for a minute.  Look at the conclusion of the article.  The final thought the author of this story wanted to leave you with:

So, is it HOT or NOT?

There’s a lovely store in a town near where I live called The Variety Store.  It’s a fitting name for the store, as there seems to be no general theme of what they sell.  Think dollar store with items of many prices.  I’ve been in there a few times needing odds and ends of what nots.  They also sell things that no one needs, including movies you haven’t heard of.  The other day as I was driving past the store, I noticed the ever changing sign in the parking lot of The Variety Store acknowledged this fact.

This made me laugh and caused me to long for a movie I had never heard of as well.  Then I remembered the movie I purchased there last spring based on the title alone.

Honey Baby, Honey Baby!

I know from the poster alone you want a taste of what the movie is like.  So here’s a video I found on YouTube that should entice you to find the film and watch it in its entirety.

Lucy started smiling a couple weeks ago.  It really melts your heart to see a tiny baby smile.  Her smiles are wide mouthed and adorable, and usually accompanied with coos that sound a lot like, “hi”.  I finally got some on video.  Before I had Lucy I figured I would leave the parental bragging posts to The Max’s life and spare one child in our home from future embarrassment, but that’s not fair to Lucy.  Here’s the first of hopefully dozens of moments she will have floating around the internet forever.

Well, it only took five days for me to break my resolution.  If I post twice today will it make up for my laziness?   It was laziness that prevented me from posting.  Last night I drank a beer, and I was down and out before the last of the bottle was gone.  So, today we are going to talk about something that will wake you up!  Egg Coffee.

It is that easy.

Supposedly, this concoction is something founded by Scandinavian Lutherans ie all the old ladies in my family.  The recipe is beyond simple and the result is fabulous.

I am a coffee snob.  I never meant to be this way, but ten years of making and studying coffee and espresso for a living left me unable to enjoy a cup of joe that was less than great. I’m always on the lookout for the best of the best coffee shops.  Sadly, in my area there are very few good ones.  The best coffee I enjoyed around here, amazingly, was in the entrance of the Central Washington Hospital on the morning I went in to deliver Lucy.  The next day I sent Mr. Pilver down to the lobby to the coffee stand to buy me another latte and it was no fluke.  It was fantastic.  I cannot drive fifty minutes to the hospital for coffee every day, I cannot even justify driving to the nearest town with the price of gas.  So, I am stuck making my own.

My coffee maker is not wonderful, so one day I decided to throw some egg shells in like my dad used to when he’d percolate coffee on the stove.  I’m obsessed with finding the origins of things on Google and Wikipedia, and I looked up putting egg shells in coffee to see where it began.  And it turns out you can put the innards of the egg in the grounds before brewing as well.  I was worried about whether the egg would cook and I would face death by salmonella  in my experiment.  It did cook, and it tasted much better than without the egg, smoother and less bitter.

Try it next time you make some coffee.  With seven chickens laying we always have extra eggs so I have started using an egg a day in my pot of coffee.  Post lottery winning I will buy a ritzy espresso machine and create world class lattes in my own kitchen.  Until then it’s egg coffee for breakfast.