Stories
The Easter Egg Hunt
aka ... "Looking for the Gold Egg"... "You get money if you find it"
Not sure what year, but in San Lorenzo.
It was the night before Easter and we were all dying eggs in the kitchen. If you wrote on the egg with a candle, then dyed it, you could see what you wrote or drew after you dyed it (very fun as a kid). Now, there was always one very special egg that had to be painted gold. It would be the $$ Money Egg. I would be for the Easter egg hunt. If you found it, you'd get a dollar!!
So, finally it was Easter and like usual, we would have an Easter egg hunt in the backyard. My dad would go out and hide all the eggs we had colored and dyed from the night before and when he was done, we'd all run around looking for eggs and screaming "I found one" and hold it up to show everyone. Well, we had been looking for quite a while and had found all the eggs, but not the gold egg... the MONEY egg! FYI... there were many adult spectators watching us run around. Well, as time went by we started whining about not being able to find the gold egg. We were getting pretty frustrated and the adults keep egging us on (pun intended) to keep looking and to try different areas in the yard. At this point, we had all pretty much given up when Poochie grandma (my moms, mom) said to try to encourage us to keep searching, "You might have to try looking under things"... and as she was saying that, she bent down and lifted up a sprinkler as a gesture of looking under something and low and behold... THERE WAS THE GOLDEN EGG! Everyone had a great laugh!!
I found a photo of almost exactly what the sprinkler looked like and you can see where the egg was hiding... Ross
The BBQ
So I was about 5 yrs. old and I don't remember a whole lot (maybe my dad will add to this with the real truth), but what I do remember (from my view), was... I was sitting up on the kitchen counter in San Lorenzo, eating a bowl of Grape Nuts, when I noticed flames shooting up from outside the window about 4' in front of me. I thought, humm... wonder what's up. I ran outside and saw my dad with the hose (that was on fire too), trying to put out the side of the house that was burning. I remember the hose had about 20 holes in it and more water was leaking out of the hose, than was getting to the flames. I pretty sure the barbeque pit had something to do with it. Well, I guess my dad got it out because the house didn't burn down. I still don't know what happened to this day. ... Ross
Fish Ponds
I believe both my dad and mom liked fish ponds. We had one in San Lorenzo and in Dublin. I'm sure there some photos of both (somewhere). We had gold fish and a turtle named "Frukie" (short u sound), that lived by the pond in San Lorenzo (play video below). There was at least one frog and we also had some cats come to visit, because you know, if there are fish swimming, there's a cat working on it. We also had bamboo surrounding the patio with "TiKi" lights (poles with kerosene containers and wicks that burn).
