A sunshine day

Had a great time touring Sacramento and Davis yesterday. (My sister is in her senior year at UC Davis, and my old pal Kevin and his family live about 5 minutes from 50.)

People think Sacramento is boring, but it is not boring. There's all kinds of stuff to do there, the railroad museum, the old historical part of town, the salmon hatchery.

Plus, Davis has great restaurants where the portions are heapin' and the waitresses are sassy.

And there's an orange grove right behind the state capitol building. Seriously. Well, it's kind of an arboretum, but there's tons of orange trees there.

We showed the kids how to knock oranges off the tree with a football.

I also tried to explain the concept of gas station premiums to them. The subject came up because Kevin was drinking juice out of this smoked glass goblet that looked just like the ones that the Shell stations used to give away in the '60's.

Who knows where the tumbler came from. Kevin, like me, is a magnet for old crap. When we lived in Philadelphia, we kept a "Museum" of non-perishable food items in my china cabinet. We had some kind of raisin bread in a can that must have been 30 years old.

The tumbler, I don't know if that dates back to our days in Philadelphia or not. It might. When Kevin and I worked together, we would eat dinner together every night at my place and watch "Brady Bunch" reruns. It was kind of a ritual. And we always tried to use period-appropriate dishware.

Because Kevin is a professionally trained and duly licensed TV personality, I asked him to put on his spokesmodel face and pose with this remarkable artifact from an bygone era of gas wars, Pillsbury Space Food Sticks, and six jumpsuit-clad youngsters blurring the line between the sitcom and variety show formats.

Kurt "big daddy" True
21 november 2005