Anyway...sorry I wasn't around much this weekend. I was planning on hitting the shop all day Sunday, but we got some surprise houseguests....my 17-year-old daughter (from a previous relationship) drove across the state to attend my baby daughter Brianna's baptism scheduled for Saturday night. Since we don't get a chance to spend much time together as it is, it was great. Had the baptism Saturday night and then spent the rest of the evening at a small (25-30) get-together in the party room at Pizza Hut. Got home about 11PM and was up playing Scrabble with her until almost 1AM. Here's a quick shot of my youngest daughter getting aquainted with my oldest:
Sunday was lazy, with all of us basically just hanging out and enjoying the visit. My daughter got to spend some time playing with her two half-brothers and half-sister. When the kids laid down for a nap right after lunch, my wife and daughter decided to do the same...so I just played around on the computer, whipping up a webpage (more on that in a minute).
Her mom was supposed to be picking her up about 6PM and then they were going to drive all night to get home (about 6 hours away). However, her mom got to within 3 miles of my house before her alternator seized up, taking the serpentine belt with it. She called me on the cell phone asking for help, so we ended up driving out to see what the damage was. When I saw what had happened, I just shut the hood and went back to town for a tow-rope. Got her towed back in town to the local repair shop's parking lot and made a call to arrange for it to be fixed first thing in the morning, since I had to work. So we all had another evening together, just relaxing and catching up on things.
When I went to work at 8AM this morning they already had it inside their shop, and had it finished up within a couple hours. They headed back about 10AM this morning.
So, all-in-all, it was an interesting weekend!
Anyway, as mentioned earlier, over the past week or so I've been slowly putting together what was originally just going to be a small tribute page to my very first car ever: a '65 Dodge Coronet 440, which I got when I was 14-15. I dug a couple old photos of it from my photo album taken the day I got the car, then dug up a few more taken of it about 10 years ago when I revisited it, and then was going to add some more taken last summer of it in it's present 'condition'. You see, the car is upside down on it's roof in a ravine on our old farm, and has a few bullet holes in it (mine, from wabbit-hunting as a teen). Here's a shot of it taken the summer of '81 when I brought it home:
CLICK HERE TO ENLARGE
...and here's a shot of it as it is today:
CLICK HERE TO ENLARGE
However, while scanning the pictures I'd recently took, it slowly dawned on me that this car was completely rust-free...even after sitting out in the elements for almost 25 years. Over the past few days I realized that the car was completely restorable....and free to me, if I wanted it. So I'm kinda thinking that this coming summer, once everything has dried out, I'm going to take a weekend and head back and winch my old car out of that ravine and bring it home. I'm just going to put it into storage for a few more years, and save it as a future project.
So I posted the 'tribute' page last night, in case any of you are really bored and wanted to check it out:
http://www.fordification.com/coronet.htm
I just love some of life's sudden twists and turns, don't you?
Keith- good story and good presentation- life is a real roller coaster- to say the least- jd- 
:):):)
