Take my son! (Trust me, there have been times in my life when I sort of said things like that about him and was really hoping for the first band of gypsies to come through and take him.) But in the long run, I'm really glad no one showed up and made me an offer on any of those days I may have been thinking like that.
Cause if that had ever happened, I wouldn't have this tall, lanky, sentimental, talented young man (hey, he's younger than me so he'll always be a "young man" in my book, ya know) to talk about here or to poke fun at a lot of the time on Facebook too. And trust me on this too -he deserves all the teasing and ragging his sisters and I hand out to him whenever we have the opportunity to do that to him!
He is artistic in many ways. Drawing, oh my yes, he's very good at art like that! Really, he's terrific considering the fact he is natural, untrained in that respect. And he does have a good modicum -now and again -too of other artistic talents. Some of those, only a select group of people might be appreciative of his efforts cause Lord knows, some of them, I haven't a clue what he's going for but what the heck. It's his talent, his time, his efforts and I'm just happy to see him playing around with those things every now and again.
He's also a bit of a collector. Or maybe I should say a "Wannabe" kind of collector cause what he'd really like to do and collect, he doesn't have the time or money to put into that!!!
He loves cars for openers but mainly just old cars. Or trucks. And right now, he has this 1971 Chevy pickup, painted a bright, bright sunshine yellow that his dad bought out in California or Nevada or Arizona -one of those hot dry states, anyway -and his dad restored this pickup then too. And, oh about 4 years ago now, his Dad sold this truck to him and Clate flew out to Nevada to finalize the deal with his Dad and then, he drove that pickup truck from Nevada back east to home, here in Pennsylvania.
He also sort of owns an old volkswagon -a Baja unit, if I have the terminology correct there. Of course, that unit -the lime green and purple trimmed VW Bug -is sort of not running at the moment and hasn't run for well over 2 or 3 years now too! The engine is out of it -needs a tad of work, ya know -to get it back together and running again. And, when Clate has a vehicle in that state, that always means too that it needs more money than he has available now or in the near future! So in the meantime, the Bug sits in wait in his garage.
He has a pickup truck -newer model but not newer than 1999 as anything THAT new would be verboten in his life of cars and trucks and such! He got it because he felt he could do a minimal amount of work on it to get it running and he'd then have a good little pickup to run back and forth to his job site -which is a 40-mile trip, one way! Thankfully, because of the way he works, he usually only has to make that trip to the job site Sunday night (and parks his vehicle there then) and then, he drives his vehicle back home on Friday evening when he finishes up for the week! However, this little pickup turned out to require more time than he had available, plus more money than he had at the time to invest in it too, so it's still sitting beside his garage, waiting for him to find the time to get the work done to get it running.
About a month or so after he invested in that pickup, he and his girlfriend realized they really needed to purchase a vehicle that was runnable upon being purchased by them -one that they wouldn't have to work on for a month -or more -to get it road worthy because winter was coming and he can't drive his nice yellow truck in the winter time as it is not the best vehicle for road conditions in the winter in central PA!
So he looked around -and looked some more -and lucked out when they found and bought a decent older Jeep Cherokee, about like mine, except theirs is black and mine is a dark red. I have no clue what year his Jeep is -heck, I can't even tell you for sure what year mine is -which tells you how much attention I pay to data like that doesn't it?
But anyway, this old Jeep of his -like mine -is worth its weight in gold during the days of bad weather and nasty roads here and gets him or his girlfriend where they need to get in a good state too!
Now this spring, Clate has also begun to delve into collecting one of the other things he is especially fond of -bicycles! He's determined -he thinks -that he is going to locate an old bicycle for each one of the adults in our family and that means he's including me in this mix too. The reason, I figure, that he wants to find a semi-decent bicycle for Mom is out of guilt he has for having destroyed my beautiful Schwinn Hornet Bike (a boys bike no less, cause I didn't like riding girl's bicycles, still don't for that matter.) when he was a kid. That bike of mine was in fantastic shape considering my aunt and uncle had purchased it for me the summer of 1955 and I rode it hard over the next 7 years and then, it got retired that is, until my son came along and discovered it! But he didn't take it out of retirement to ride it -no! He took it out of retirement to cannibalize it! And a bang-up job he did of that too!
So now, so far this spring, he's come home with two bicycle finds -one of which is parked out in front of my house now that he picked up for his sister, Mandy. She loves it -banana seat and all -even though it needs more than a little bit of work to get it looking half-decent as it's pretty rusted. The other bike he picked up isn't as bad to look at as the one he got for Mandy and he has it up at his house. I think that one is supposed to be for his older sister, Carrie. I can hardly wait to see what he finds to bring home and gift to me!
But if he's gonna be getting more and more bicycles for his sisters, his girlfriend, himself, for me, he's definitely going to have to invest in something else too - an suv bike rack - in order to have some means of transporting these bikes all around.
And for sure he'll need that to take his sister Mandy's bike any place at all because, one of the things that bike needs, right off the bat -is brakes!
And this area has too damned many hills around here to try riding a bike with no brakes down!
And, that's the truth!
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