Life of Brian

1998

Nineteen ninety-eight.  A year of moving.  Sarah and I moved into an apartment in Ventura.  These were single story units.  They were made out of cinder block and about six or seven units were attached to one another down a row side to side, not end to end.  I don't recall being able to hear our neighbors so the noise insulation must have been decent.  In total I think there were no more than twenty-five units.  I liked this particular complex.  It was much nicer than our second-floor apartment in Stockton.  I was working nights at iti at the time.  My shifts were from 3p.m. to 11 p.m.  This left me plenty of time to sleep and also plenty of time to play golf with my dad and uncle Raymond in the mornings.  At some point, iti would move its company from Ojai to Oxnard in 98.  They had a state-of-the-art building built down on Wooley St. in Oxnard.  There were mixed feelings about this.  The owner's son had taken over the company a few years prior and he had made the decision.  Many of iti's employees lived in Ojai.  They were not too happy about the commute to the new facility.  I didn't mind it at all.  The new building was huge in comparison and everything in it, besides all the old machinery the company brought with it, was shiny and new.  It had a big break room with lots of windows.  In Ojai our breakroom didn't have a single window.  The square footage was probably triple the size of the Ojai shop.  Sad thing is, once this big move was made the company really began to go downhill.  But that didn't occur for several years after.  I would ride share with a buddy of mine.  His name was Guy.  He and I got along very well.  He was a funny individual.  

Prior to the big move of our company, I had volunteered to work graveyards for about two months.  Our department was incredibly busy making diamond cutting blades and my supervisor decided that we needed a third shift for a two-month span.  Myself and one other dept. 600 employee would work from 11p.m. to 7a.m.  I was all excited at first!  I'd never worked a graveyard shift.  Being young, I was very naive.  It was not fun at all.  We were tasked with operating surface grinders for the entire shift.  Once you set the grinder up there wasn't much else to do so the down time was lengthy.  This meant your brain was left to wander.  At 3 in the morning, the only trail your brain wants to follow is the great trail of sleep!  Those of you that know, know!  Additionally, my co-worker and I discovered that we could each run two machines at a time.  The company was only expecting the workload of each of us running one machine at a time.  This little discovery meant that one of us could go back into the resin lab and sleep for about three hours.  This was brilliant.  We thought we had it made.  Lo and behold our supervisor was either tipped off by someone from another department, or she just had the inkling that she should probably check up on the building because she busted a guy sleeping in another dept!  Luckily, we heard about this before she ever caught on to us.  The guy she caught sleeping in dept. 500 was suspended for a day.  Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't believe she ever suspected us because our workload was always on par with her expectations.  She probably thought there was no way we could be sleeping and complete all the blades that we did.  This was before the age of cameras everywhere too, so we had it easy.  

Guy and I became friends very quickly.  He was a goof ball and was always in a good mood and making jokes.  He and I would go camping together up at Marian Campground in the Los Padres.  He bought the alcohol for the trip, and I bought the food.  His choice of alcohol ... the cheapest he could find!  Anyone ever drank Yukon Jack whiskey?  You're lucky if you haven't!  You could remove the paint from your car with that stuff.  We didn't care, down the gullet it went chasing down multiple Keystone beers.  Now Keystone beer is not bad, it's really bad.  But the two soon became just like the finest wine in all of Italy before the night was over.  At one point, we were in his Toyota 4x4 truck driving up the 4x4 routes out of camp.  I seem to recall Guy tried to run over a small tree.  This of course ended in failure.  Everything was all fine and dandy until the next morning.  What I did not know, was that Guy was consuming a third product in which I was not made privy to.  He was taking some sort of medication that in all actuality should not have been mixed with alcohol.  Especially rot gut alcohol!  He was up early in the morning and needing to puke his brains out.  He walked over to a big sturdy pine tree out of my sight, which was very polite of him.  Just as the combination of Yukon Hack, Keystone sudds, hot dogs and chili beans, and stomach bile began shooting out of him like he was the Exorcist, a jeep approached from a dirt road right in front of Guy.  A father had decided to take his son out for a nice early morning offroad adventure, and his son was treated to the sight of a 5'6" man expulsing the insides of his stomach!  Good times those were.  And I bet that was the first thing that little boy told his mother when he got home that day.

I'd be lying if I told you I didn't sort of miss my days working at Drain Patrol in Stockton.  As I said, Eddie my training partner was a heck of nice guy.  The last call out he and I worked together was at an apartment complex.  There were a lot of Asian and Vietnamese people in Stockton.  This apartment complex was comprised totally with people of this ethnicity.  The reason I mention this is because these people loved to eat rice and chilies.  The chilies were the little red kind, possibly serrano, but I could be mistaken.  They'd come tied up in long spires or clusters.  The apartment dwellers would bring the chili's outside, and I guess wash them or dry them, I'm not certain.  Because of the amount of rice consumed, the apartments main line was terribly impacted and they had major back up issues.  This would become a weeklong job for Eddie.  Before we were able to finish this job, I was given my own route and was sent off on my own to complete my own jobs.  I remember Eddie telling me back at the shop one evening that he had pulled his truck into the parking lot of the apartments one day and completely destroyed a wok full of those red little chilies'.  He said it was a chili murder scene after he was done moving his truck and the residents were very angry with him!  I'd soon run into the angry lady I mentioned in an earlier post who yelled at me for a poor toilet install and I ended up quitting, but not before some success stories of happy customers of jobs that I completed on my own.  I wonder if Eddie is still alive.  And is he still cleaning drains.  Getting back to present day, one of my biggest challenges in 98 was fixing my slice on the golf course.  I had gotten my dad into golfing.  We would go down to the Saticoy golf course when he was just starting out.  We only had one set of clubs, and Saticoy was kind of a crappy nine-hole course.  On one particular outing, we were paired up with a couple of older ladies.  Around the ninth hole, the two old ladies disappeared, and we soon discovered that they had gone to the clubhouse to rat us out.  Seems each player was supposed to have their own set of golf clubs, and we did not.  We'd been called out and we had to leave the course early.  We waited for the two old hags in the parking lot and when they finished the back nine and returned to their vehicle, we jumped on them and gave them a what for and told them to never show their faces again at the Saticoy golf course!  lol, not really.  We were surprised that they ratted us, and my dad soon purchased his own set of clubs.

Headlines around the nation included the Monica Lewinsky scandal.  "I did not have sexual relations with that woman".  - POTUS Bill Clinton. The movie Titanic, which was released in 97, was the first movie to gross a billion dollars!  I saw that movie more than once!  Why didn't it come up when I searched for it last blog!  lol.  The Columbine High School shooting happened.  To this day, the powers that be are still arguing over gun control when they could have been focusing on how to make schools safer for the students within them!  Shameful.  Google was founded in 98 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.  Linda McCartney died of breast cancer.  The U.S. and China would sign a historic trade agreement.  Currently, China is thought to have caused one of the worst viruses since influenza in the 1500's.  Covid is still taking the lives of a few citizens in every country to this day.  China is also threatening Tawain whom the U.S. is acting bodyguard for.  Mr. Bill Clinton would be impeached for his little fling with Ms. Lewinsky.  The MP3 player was introduced in 98.  

A couple of movies that came out in 98 were titles such as Saving Private Ryan, Armageddon, There's Something About Mary and The Waterboy.  I did see all of those movies.  With the exception of Armageddon, they were all fairly good.  Elton John's song "Candle in the Wind" was at the top of the charts along with "How do I Live" by LeAnn Rimes, and "You're Still the One" by Shania Twain.

I must not have watched much T.V. at the age of 23.  I do not recognize any of the shows listed.  Probably because I worked nights, and I sure as hell wasn't watching soap operas during the day!  At some point in 98 I would apply to the Sheriff's Department.  I had also become a volunteer with the Upper Ojai Search and Rescue team.  Being a member of the SAR team was a blast, and an eye opener.  I have quite a few stories from our callouts.  Most aren't funny, but this one is:  We would train quite frequently covering situations such as rescues over the side of a cliff.  There was a nice little rock cliff on Thacher's property where we would practice repelling.  One of our repelling trainings took place up Santa Paula Cyn.  The entire team was flown up to some cliffs overlooking the creek.  These particular cliffs weren't simply straight up and down.  They had shelves to them.  I had never encountered a shelf whilst repelling and my brain kind of froze.  I could not figure out how to lower myself beyond the shelf without face planting into the cliff face.  While my brain was reviewing the issue, I simply let go of my brake hand and descended roughly ten feet down to the bottom of the cliff in a matter of seconds!  To everyone around watching me, it looked as though I simply knew what I was doing and had just fast repelled over the shelf.  Little did they know that I had fallen those ten feet and luckily landed on my two legs without breaking or tweaking anything!  Every time we practiced repelling after this incident I was scared out of my mind!  In fact, the first training session back at the easy wall at Thacher, I had to have a team member pull me back up over the edge because I was locked in fear.  I was able to overcome this, but it took quite a few more repels to do so.  I have a lot of good content coming up in the next decade.  Things are about to get spicy up in this blog!  Stay tuned.

"Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries."

Monty Python's The Holy Grail

-French Soldier

Life of Brian

1997

In June of 1997 I had been married for one year.  Things were going well. I had been hired back at iti full time.  Sarah started working at our local bank in Ojai in the fall of 97.  We did not have a lot of money as newlyweds.  I remember going into our bank while she worked there and trying to withdrawal five dollars from our checking account.  Sarah took care of the transaction that day and promptly told me we didn't have five dollars to withdrawal!  Her boss Martha came to my aid and said something like, "It's only five bucks!"  We all get a laugh from this today, but I understand where Sarah was coming from.  We basically had no money to our names at the time.  She probably wasn't making much more than four twenty-five and hour.  My job was paying me right around seven dollars an hour.  Heck, for five bucks back then, you could buy four gallons of gas.  Today, you're lucky if five bucks even buys you one gallon of gas.  She and I were living in my parents fifth wheel trailer for some part of 97.  I think we moved into her parents' house after that.  We couldn't afford rent just yet, but we soon would rent a place of our own.  We couldn't afford anything in Ojai, but we did end up finding an apartment in Ventura.  Sarah's dad was a long-haul truck driver at the time which meant he was gone for three weeks at a time and only home for three days in between.  So, it was just Sarah me and her mom most of the time.  All of my family was still around.  My Dad still working for the Forest Service, my mom I think still cleaning houses.  I'm not sure what Angela was up to; she may have been going to a local community college.  Vicki was working, I do not remember where.

Leaving Stockton was not a bad thing.  As I mentioned before, Stockton was a fairly violent city.  And it was the biggest city we'd ever lived in.  The population of Ojai was under ten thousand people.  Ventura might have had seventy thousand people.  Stockton had two hundred and thirty-five thousand people in nineteen ninety-seven.  Sirens wailed what seemed like every thirty minutes.  There were homicides committed within the city quite often, and traffic was something I was not really used to.  There were multi lane freeways and buses and filth.  However, like many cities, Stockton had its good areas, as well as areas where the wealthy lived.  Stockton also had a multitude of sloughs.  If there's one thing I truly loved doing as a young adult, it was fishing.  My training partner at the plumbing company I worked for liked to fish as well.  Eddie was a nice guy.  He wasn't wealthy by any means.  He had only worked at Drain Patrol for maybe six years.  Once he found out I loved to fish, he offered to rent a boat and take us out into the sloughs of Stockton.  He paid for it which I was very appreciative of.  We left early in the morning, he skippered the small boat out to a nice quiet slough, and we started fishing.  It was surprisingly quiet out there in those sloughs.  Eddie decided he had to ask me a question.  The weird part about it was that he stated it just as such.  He said, "Brian, I need to ask you a question."  This of course made me a little uneasy.  After all, we were all by ourselves in a small little boat surrounded by water.  I could have swum for the shore, but how in the heck would I have gotten home!  And more than likely, I would have been murdered before even getting there!  Ended up his question was how I felt about smoking Mary Jane, Jazz lettuce, Whacky Weed, Marijuana.  In all actuality, I was very relieved.  I told him that I didn't care if he smoked it, but I did not touch the stuff and to please not blow the smoke in my direction.  It was actually very nice of him to ask.  He could've just started smoking and not given two cents about what I thought.  I don't think either of us caught any fish that morning.  He must have been more than a casual user of the green plant because his ability to command our 12-foot aluminum skiff never faltered.  I would never see Eddie again after leaving Drain Patrol.  Viking Freight and Drain Patrol were the only two jobs I had in Stockton.  I sat through a training seminar for CutCo knives.  I quickly decided that job was not for me, however.  I was not a salesman.  I also was in the process of applying to Target, but we ended up moving back to Ojai before getting too far in the hiring process.  My days at Drain Patrol were interesting ones.  One particular call out, when I was still training with Eddie, we arrived at a house in Lodi.  The residents claimed they had multiple drains clogged.  Knowing this, we went straight for the main line with our fifty feet of snake cable.  Something caught my eye this time.  We'd cleaned out numerous main lines by this time in my training, yet I never came upon a main line clean-out cap where the sewage was already squeezing its way out of it!  Neither of us really knew what that meant.  With the cap removed, and a small puddle of sewage now at our feet, we sent all fifty feet of cable down that main line, and it did not do a thing.  All drains were still clogged.  That fifty feet of cable that had gone out had to come back in so that we could attach another fifty feet to it and send it back out.  Well, that first fifty feet of line was now covered in sewer water and who knows what else!  As we spun the basket to retrieve it, we were gifted with a nice shower of sewer water with every spin.  It was a bad day to be a drain cleaner!  We attached the extra fifty feet and sent it back down the pipe.  This still, did not touch the blockage.  About this time of the evening, a big city sewer truck pulled up.  They lifted the manhole in the street and confirmed that the entire city streets sewer was backed up!  Our little snake was never going to fix this problem!  We retracted our hundred feet of line, all the while trying to dodge the sprinkler effect of sewage water that we now knew was the entire streets poop and pee.  We collected our ninety dollars from the resident and said our apologies that we were not able to fix it.  The city sewer truck began sending its mega snake down the manhole.  Luckily for us, this was the last call of the day.  We were able to go home and shower instead of working in our soiled uniforms for hours on end.  One thing is for sure.  I will never work as a plumber ever again.

Some headlines around the globe in 1997 were as follows.  Frank Sinatra would be sent back to the hospital with heart problems.  In January, the first Comet of 97 was discovered.  A company by the name of Dow Corning would pay out two hundred ninety-five billion to settle breast implant suits.  Italy's new 1000 lire coin would depict divided Germany on the map.  Atlantis 18 was launched into space.  Bad boy Dennis Rodman would pay $200,00.00 in a settlement for kicking a ref in the groin during a game.  He would end up being suspended indefinitely for this act by the NBA.  On February fourth, O.J. Simpson would be found liable for the deaths of Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson in a civil court action.  General Hospital would win the Soap Opera Digest award. Boy did I despise watching those shows!  My sisters used to love watching those.  FBI agent Earl Pitts was busted for selling secrets to Russia.

Usually, I list the top movies for a given year.  However, when looking up this list, I do not recall seeing any of the movies listed!  So, I'll skip this topic for this year in time. Same with T.V. shows.  I guess I wasn't watching much T.V. in 97.  Home sales were picking up in 97.  Southern Ca was in a slump supposedly up to mid 95/96 and in 97 home sales were up a whopping 20% than the year prior.  The last four months of home sales in 97 would see the strongest sales pace of the decade.  The median price for a new home within the state was $172,525.00.  Gasoline was stable at $ 1.23 per gallon.  

Ninety-seven was a good time in my life.  Newly married, I was working at a really good job, Sarah was working.  My oldest Sister Angela tied the knot in 97.  She would become responsible for a tiny human just short of a year before Sarah and me.  We would begin saving money and eventually rent our own apartment.  I would play golf with my dad and my U. Raymond.  Everyone was healthy.  We had nothing but the future to look forward to, an exciting time indeed.

"You'll have bad times, but it will always wake you up to the good stuff you weren't paying attention to".

-Robin Williams Movie - Good Will Hunting