All About Pacaras

My Facebook page has been adding friends every since I first signed up about three years ago. I just realized this morning that I have over 500 Facebook friends. But a whole lot of these friends are people I have never met. I would love to meet most of them some day. But they have become friends with me because we share mutual friends. I think that is the best way to meet new people – to have a mutual friend.

Another big group of friends on my Facebook list are people that I went to high school with and we are now reconnecting. We are going to have a class reunion and we are all very busy hunting down our friends and former classmates. That is fun – especially when you do find some people who you had lost touch with and now you find out they moved to California and got married or moved back to Virginia and work for a Beltway Bandit company. We have a lot of memories to share and a lot of catching up to do.

Strangely, the smallest group of these Facebook friends if people that I used to work with. This puzzles me. When I left those jobs everyone was happy and seemed sincere about keeping in touch. But most of them don’t. I really thought that most of the people I worked with over the years were good people and loosely defined as friends. I saw them every day. We exchanged pleasantries. We recognized each others accomplishments and life’s milestones. We were a community that formed inside an office building instead of a residential neighborhood. I guess that I was wrong about that and it bothers me a lot.

As a kid, we lived in a big house in an upscale neighborhood. The house was heated in the winter by an oil furnace that used heating oil delivered by a big tanker truck. I am pretty sure the brand of oil and the company that delivered the oil to our house was called “Standard Oil” in big red letters without a big red circle around the letters.

We bought gas at whatever gas station was handy when we noticed the fuel indicator gauge pointed to “low” on the car dashboard. There was a Sunoco station close to our house and my dad had a charge account at that station. All we had to do was drive up and park next to the pump. An attendant would rush out, dispense the gas, wash off your windshield and ask if you need anything else done to the car, like check the oil, put air in the tires or even add water and antifreeze to the radiator.

The other gas stations near us were an Esso, a Sinclair and an offbrand called Scotch. Later on we got a Gulf, Mobile and Shell. None of those brands are represented here except for Shell. Funny how times change.

We’ve got a craving to Dominos pizza. I found a coupon to get two pizzas for just $10, and I figured for that price we could add some hot wings to the order. Turns out they have both hot wings and boneless chicken. So I ordered an 8 piece boneless chicken to go along with the pizzas.

What I didn’t realize was that they charge a huge tax on the food order – sorry, but that just doesn’t seem right, tax on food – plus they add a delivery charge to it. The total was almost thirty bucks. But it got there in 20 minutes, tasted great, I didn’t have to cook and it was my splurge for the week.

My nephew goes to a public school in a pretty rough part of town. His mom can’t afford a place anywhere else. All she does is go from one entry level job to another, chasing the almighty dollar and getting fired or laid off after just a few months.

The weird thing is that I was over there when the kid got home from school on Friday and he asked me for some help with his homework. I didn’t mind, but I was surprised that the second grade math problems required him to roll dice and add the numbers together. Now, maybe that teacher was just trying to be creative and engage the kids in something besides just a sheet of math problems. But why would she tell kids to get dice from their parents for homework? That’s just crazy.

P.S. – she didn’t even have any dice in the house. She had to send the kid across the street to a neighbor’s house and borrow some.

Awww. I had a bad feeling when I addressed the Christmas card for my friend Alicia that she might not receive it. Sure enough, it came back today as returned mail. Bummer! I feel badly that we have lost touch and that I do not have a current address for her. I wonder if I can track her down on Facebook? Maybe I can at least find an email address and let her know that I need her home address.