I relived a good memory today

Flooring Forum - DIY & Professional

Help Support Flooring Forum - DIY & Professional:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

highup

Will work for food
Supporting Member
Pro
Joined
Mar 6, 2011
Messages
17,896
Location
,
Jon sent me an email with tickets for their next cruise. The one to Antarctica. I think he sent the email over a year before the voyage date. Only 400 passengers on board so he had to book well in advance.
When they were leaving, he let me know. I was able to track him southward past the Falkland Islands using an app Marinetraffic.com it's was a free site, but only for radio transmission. Satellite tracking option is expensive.
One night , Jon sent me an Email asking if I knew a particular couple from my town. He said, "they don't know you"
I knew who they were, but they didn't know me. I once installed a piece of carpet in a downstairs room when they purchased their home in the late 80's
The couple owned a lumber brokerage 10 miles from town and sold lumber all over the world. I found out later they had two other outlets. One in Tacoma WA, and another in Long Beach CA.
That was so, so strange, Jon meeting these people..... during a cruise to Antarctica.
A few months earlier, I drove to up to their business to look the place over.... either for some repairs or to bid on redoing the office.
I never even knew this business existed. The office probably had over a dozen people working in it. I was a wee bit surprised at their operation.
The job was way larger than I would do, so I didn't even measure it.
Now, back to the story. Here's Jon and Shirley and they meet a couple at dinner one night. Jon discovers the couple is from Coos Bay and queries them about me, the of course, Jon emails me about their encounter. What are the chances. 🤯
Ok, ok, I'm getting to the end 😁
I went to measure a room for that couple this afternoon. They added on a new bedroom.
Not long after meeting the couple today, I told them I knew about their trip to Antarctica. I mentioned Jon and Shirley from New Zealand. They remembered them well and spoke highly of them. A very nice couple they said.
The world is a small place.
I found out from Jon, from New Zealand, while 10,000 miles away on a cruise in Antarctica, that Pat and his wife, from Coos Bay, Oregon had sold their business and retired.
Small towns can keep secrets. 😁
 
Last edited:
Never know who you will meet. A friend of mine from Independence Missouri, came out of a Walmart in Chicago with his girlfriend. He ran into his next door neighbors from Independence who were good friends with his wife,,,oops.
 
It is strange. My brother and I worked for an older couple for a few days. The day after we finished the job, we headed 600 miles to California for a family vacation. On the way south, driving through the redwoods, we made a snap decision to stop for a burger at a small diner we saw.
We walked in and saw that older couple setting at the counter.
While working for them, we never mentioned our trip.
Strange enough stopping at the same place, but if setting with our backs to the, we'd never have known they were there.... or we could have missed them by five minutes.
That was worthy of some Twilight Zone music.
 
25 years ago I did a double octogon home on the bluff.
It's 75 feet above the beach. Not a large place. It's two 22' siamesesd octogons. It's a 10 mile drive to the place.
The owners were from Oakland CA. I met and talked with them in early November to discuss details and we chatted for an hour.
They reurned home to Oakland. All I knew was that 3 days before Christmas, they were going to be there for two weeks. That wasn't a deadline. It was just so I'd know that I couldn't work during their Christmas vacation.
I was doing a ton..... No, 6 tons of repairs and prep, then installing Wilsonart tiles and Pergo Supreme everywhere, upstairs and down. (Glue together... Click didn't exist)
As Christmas slowley approached, I planned my retreat. I removed tools nightly as I no longer needed them. The upstairs was now complete and the downstairs was too with the exception of the Wilsonart base. I vacuumed the entire home top to bottom, counters and all. With a warm bucket of water, I started upstairs, wiping with a damp towel, then drying with a dry one..... Yes, counter tops and all. By 11:00pm, everything I owned was in my van. The place was clean and shiney, awaiting the arrival of the owners the following day.
So I slept in late and in the afternoon on a Sunday as I recall, I stopped at the hardware store for something.
I was at the checkout counter......
......and guess who walked in. 😱
Yup, the home owners. They had arrived to the home, dropped off luggage, then drove to town to buy a Christmas tree stand ....at this hardware store. ...and here we are staring at each other.
I spent one hour meeting with these people 7 weeks earlier.
I had left their beach home 15 hours earlier and next time I see them is in this hardware store?
Hell, we could have missed each other by hours or just been on different isles and not seen each other.
Freaky weird.
They later retired and moved here. He ran the nuclear division of PGE in Oakland. Very, very nice people.
They even held a "workers party" as a thank you. Catered of course and even hired a band to play all afternoon. 👍
 
Last edited:
I was sitting in one of the little hamburger stands in Disney world and noticed a guy across the way that looked famililar. I approached him and aske if he was fro Michigna which he was. As one thing tha t led to another i found out he was the manager of the apt complex I had lived in. Gave him my rent check a bunch of times.
 
Stepped out of a store in Joplin Mo. and ran into a cousin I had not seen in 20 years.
Got sent to Ft. Leonard Wood to usher out of the Army. Company commander was from my hometown.
 
I'd love to hear some math wizard describe the probability of these kind of things happening. I'm sure someone has done it. If the chances were a billion to one then most people would never experience this. The odds can't be that high because it seems everyone has at least one story along these lines.
 
I miss Jon.

I've had a few of those weird coincidences.
My parents went to Australia (while we were living in Guam) for a trip and started talking to a couple who liked diving. They found out that we had a mutual friend from Singapore. Another time my sister came to visit in Guam and was on a ship for diving and met up with one of her former classmates from LSMSA (Louisiana School of Math Science & the Arts).

My dad once told me about how when he was sent over to Thailand (he was 17 so they waited until he was 18 to send him to Vietnam) in the Army, they were doing a roll-call & said a familiar surname. Something like Tackajaye (not sure on spelling) and the guy answered with a NJ accent. My dad approached him after and asked if he knew (can't remember the first name) and the guy said "That's my cousin!" So it was the cousin of one of my dad's friends.
 
I'd love to hear some math wizard describe the probability of these kind of things happening. I'm sure someone has done it. If the chances were a billion to one then most people would never experience this. The odds can't be that high because it seems everyone has at least one story along these lines.
 
Yeah but what are the odds of the odds of that? 😁
There's no chance that a math wizard is reading the Flooring Forum. But my son had a good story about entering UCLA as a math major. There was a summer school class he took before Freshman year to get out ahead of the herd. There was close to 150 students. He told me the first test they took he scored "class average" on the curve but it was a really crappy test because the class average was something like 75 correct answers out of 200 questions. He was angry at the professor for giving such a stupid hard test. So I asked him if the average was 75 correct what were the top scores? He says there were couple/three guys who got 190+ answers correct.

See, now the professor knows who is sitting in the classroom, doesn't he? Those will be his PhD. students in a few years and eventually run his department. My son quickly changed majors. Turns out the kids coming in from other countries are WAY, WAY ahead of Americans in STEM courses. They are actually bored and the 100/200 level courses are stuff they learned already. Our kids would be struggling and failing and those kids would be bored to tears sitting side by side.

Interesting tidbit I learned about that. The Asians are discriminated against in all of our top private universities-----Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stamford, MIT, Caltech. Only a small percentage are allowed entry. So they can get into UC schools because California does not allow blatant racial preferences. So that explains it. Those kids in that math class likely SHOULD have been at Caltech, MIT (the two best STEM schools probably in the world) but the best they could do was UCLA which does in fact have great STEM programs------almost in league with Caltech/MIT
 
My daughter runs a laboratory at UCLA. She has been there for the last 4 years and loves it, except it is low paying.
One of my sons taught at Berkeley for a few years, too far left for him. He is working in a lab somewhere. He has a Phd. in plant science.

As far as low paying, when my daughter got her teaching cert, she was working at a Burger King. It would have been a pay cut to teach. She is now a home health care nurse and working on her Prn.
 
Last edited:
I had a geography class where the teacher had a Phd in geography. His spelling and grammar were so bad that we had a hard time understanding what he wanted. It was an on-line class.
 
My daughter runs a laboratory at UCLA. She has been there for the last 4 years and loves it, except it is low paying.
My son also runs a laboratory here;

https://www.scripps.edu/research/iscb/index.html
I'm still paying insurance, registration and AAA on the 2005 Buick we gave him as a graduation present. He's trying to buy a house down there (La Jolla) but the prices are way, way, way crazy.

But I'll say this much. It's certainly one of the most beautiful places to live on God's Green Earth. We came out here roundabout '83 driving down from San Francisco to San Diego and further down into Baja Mexico on vacation and that's when we decided to move from Connecticut. Even then our COMBINED incomes (teacher and flooring guy) could not get us incomes to support property in the IDEAL places we really wanted to live-------Santa Barbara, Ventura, San Diego/La Jolla.

Kinda broke my wife's heart that we wound up in Covina. That's now not even in the reach of middle class incomes.
 
La Jolla is really a beautiful area. Way out of my reach as well.

I began with buying my first house at the age of 18, in 1973, a VA repossessed home, in Hacienda Heights for $21,950. Got divorced 3 years later. Sold the home in 1977 for $43k, gave her $20k, kept $20k and I bought another home in Azusa. I paid $49,900. Got married 3 years later. Sold that house for $98k, moved to La Verne and paid $126,400. 25 years later I divorced and walked away from that home, which she sold for $890K. I moved into my new G/F's house, and 3 years later we bought this house in Upland together for $550k. I've always joked that when I see a pretty woman, I'll just bypass the grief and give them a new house.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top