The Gross Blog

Author: Steven Gross

  • Day 26 – Outdoor Wooden Toy Chest (Throw)

    Day 26 – Outdoor Wooden Toy Chest (Throw)

    I went out to get something from the garage the other day and noticed a situation that needed attention.  A few years ago when our neighbor across the street moved away, he left a big old aquarium (that he must have been using to house a lizard or turtle) right there on the curb in front of his house. I took it.  I admit that I too am a curbside collector!  I always wanted a big old fish tank, but they’re so expensive – this one just needed a scouring pad and some elbow grease and it would be mine….  This thing had to hold 50 gallons or more!

    Now I knew that our current house was much too small for an aquarium of that size, so the monster took up room in the garage with all the other “necessities” (We’ve never kept a car in there!).  This summer I pulled it out when The Princess (age 3) fell in love with a toad (named Sally, apparently) which we found in the back yard.  Continuing a Gross family tradition, we figured we’d keep the toad (for a while) as a pet.  I lugged that fish tank from the garage and set it on top of the wooden toy chest beside the entrance to the garage.  We pushed all the pea gravel to one side so Sally would have a hill on one end and a pond on the other.  The Princess would pull Sally out every few days and play with her and, inevitably, Sally would make a run for it and disappear.  We’d find her again a few days or weeks later in the yard – surprised at how much she had grown … or shrunk – and back into the fish tank she’d go.  Eventually we realized we were seeing two separate toads, so the second became known as Jumper. Toward the end of summer, the toads no longer reappeared, but the fish tank, of course, sat on top of the toy chest.  We’ve gotten a lot of rain recently and that’s what caught my eye when I walked out to the garage the other day – the tank was half full of water and the weather was cold enough lately that the water was starting to ice over.  It ocurred to me that the fish tank wouldn’t last too long with ice expanding inside it. So I bailed about half the water out with a small bucket and then decided it would be a whole lot quicker to dump the rest.  I tipped the aquarium up on one end and … it went crashing through the top of the toy chest!  The wood was so rotten that it could no longer support the weight of that thing.  Fortunately, the crash happened in slow motion and I was able to prevent any damage to the fish tank itself, but the toy chest (and most of the long-forgotten toys inside it) went into the trash can for pick up today. There won’t be opportunity to spot toads for months to come now.  I hate winter … and not just because it’s toadless.  I know life in Haiti is going to be hot and sweaty, but I don’t know how much I will miss the cold and snow.  While I was in Haiti, I kept thinking what a kick our kids would get out of chasing and catching lizards.  I suppose that would be a year-round sport there.  I would guess I saw about 20 or 30 lizards a day without even looking for them.  They ranged in size from two inches to two feet! Speaking of Haiti… If you are inclined to pray, pray for the country as they try to sort out a very messy presidential election while continuing to deal with cholera.  And if you are inclined to pray for me and my family, here’s the number one prayer request on my heart at the moment (because we’ll have to start acting soon if it is going to happen):  Melissa and I would LOVE to take our kids down to Haiti this coming summer for four or five weeks.  We’d serve together as a family in whatever way we could there at the OMS compound in Cap Haitien.  On top of being a chance to serve, it would give us a great opportunity to introduce the kids to the country and the people and to see how the four of them cope.  The thing is, it would be an expensive endeavor, and at a time when we are trying to sell the house and pay off debts, we refuse to consider putting it on a credit card!  Would you pray for us that we would seek God’s guidance on this … and trust in his provision if, in fact, it is in his will for this to happen?  Thanks! By the way, anyone want to buy a large toad habitat?

  • Day 25 – “The Bourne Identity” and a Clay Dinosaur (Give)

    Day 25 – “The Bourne Identity” and a Clay Dinosaur (Give)

    We had a meeting tonight at church – and by “we” I mean the folks who went to Haiti in October.  Three were missing: Steve is off hunting, Wayne winters in Florida, and nobody was quite sure where Rose Ellen was.  But five of us got together to plan our gathering this coming Sunday, December 5.  We are inviting folks to come hear about the trip (it’s 4 to 5:30 at the church). Anyway, I took the opportunity to take along a couple of items to give to Beka.  She mentioned last Sunday that she thought the Bourne movies were good, so I gave her the book.  I read the book recently and only then saw the first movie.  Loved the book.  Hated the movie!  It is nowhere near as good as the book, but the time constraints of the big screen preclude the possibility of capturing the full story, so I don’t know what I was expecting.  Plus, I thought the final shoot out where Matt Damon falls several stories down a stairwell while riding a body and shooting at other bad guys as they climb the steps just completely jumped the shark.

    Anyway, Beka had stopped at our house briefly last Sunday and had asked if I had any examples of my artwork around.  There’s really nothing here but some of my stained glass pieces, so when I came across the clay dinosaur, I thought I’d give it to her.  I told her tonight that she has to pray for me and my family whenever she looks at it.  She decided to name it Walter.

  • Day 24 – Odds and Ends (Throw)

    Day 24 – Odds and Ends (Throw)

    I found a round tin with a Norman Rockwell print on the lid and inside was a shrine of sorts to my childhood and teen years.  I couldn’t bring myself to part with a toy car, a “God’s Nightcrawler” patch, a Cincinnati Reds ring (which my Dad bought for me at a Reds game back when Pete Rose played for them – I remember sitting through a game where some drunk guy a few rows up from us continually yelled, “Pete Rose is a hamburger!” … I never figured out if that was supposed to be an insult or compliment.), an old pocket knife, a wallet from the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), a little woven art project I entered in some contest when I was 14, and a button that says “Urbana ’87”.  The Urbana Conference I attended as a college sophomore was the first time I ever considered the possibility of becoming a missionary.  At the time it was just a thought … a daydream, maybe. Here’s a list of other items from the tin that didn’t make the cut:

    • Various ink pens [“Outdoor Ministries”, “Wabash College”, “Newscenter 13”, “Adam’s Mark Hotel”]
    • 3 Dried up boutonnieres [Labeled as “Senior Prom 1986” (lame night), “May Festival 1986” (dumbest night of my high school career), and “Jeanne Kirkpatrick Dinner 1987” (where Masato Suzuki gave the former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. bunny ears for a photo and also told several of his female professors that they looked quite “arrogant” rather than “elegant”!)]
    • A single one inch square tile from the Wabash College pool [Where I worked as a swim coach for a year]
    • A “Skylab” sticker
    • A live bullet (!) [From gopher hunting in South Dakota]
    • A pack of sugar from “The Berghoff” in Chicago [That must have been the art guild trip where I shared a hotel room with Scott and Larry.  Scott dared Larry to strip to his underwear, stuff a pair of socks in the front and step out into the hallway.  Larry took the bait.  When Larry stepped out the door, Scott slammed it shut and locked it!]
    • A mood ring [It is now just solid black]
    • A rubber dinosaur
    • Miniature post cards – some from New York City and some of the Columbia space shuttle
    • A match book from Mr. Gatti’s Pizza in Crawfordsville, Indiana
    • A couple of name tags from Youth Annual Conference [On the back is listed who went along from my church.  1985: Byron Brown, Kate Stubbs and Pat Kyle.  1986: Kim Stone, Dawn Stevens, Yvonne Bradburn, my brother Russell, and Marcia Kuhn.]
    • A card with my Scottish address my junior year of college [Wavell House T21, Hillhead Halls of Residence, Don Street, Aberdeen AB9 2WU, Scotland]
    • A vial full of white sand [From Florida, I think.]
    • The tassel from my high school graduation in 1986

    Amazing how many memories these objects bring back – and I guess that’s why I kept them.  My kids were fascinated with each little item I brought out of the tin – and they made off with a couple of things before I could throw them away!  It’s funny how a packet of sugar brings to mind the sheer joy Scott and I shared watching Larry through the peephole as he danced around in the hallway of a Chicago hotel, frantically pounding on our room door and cursing because he had nothing but his underwear … and a pair of socks.  Also amazing to me is how I quickly vacillate between determination to toss these items and reluctance to toss them.  It makes it a bit easier to toss them knowing that they are recorded here, because words are somehow just as good (or better) than the physical objects themselves.

  • Day 23 – Two Space Heaters (Throw)

    I threw away two space heaters.  Our basement is always cold in the winter time.  Melissa likes it warm, so we had three little space heaters which we scattered around the downstairs rooms and then stored during the warmer months alongside the Christmas decorations.  At the end of last winter, only one of the heaters was still working.  None of them oscillate anymore.  One just kept shutting itself off.  The other one would overheat and smell like burning dust.  The Princess (age 3) got a small burn on her leg from that particular heater last winter.  So why store the two broken heaters?  Because “some day” I was going to get around to unscrewing the backs of them, blowing all the dust out of their innards and then hoping they wouldn’t burn the house down when I plugged them back in.  I’m probably better off with them in the garbage can.  Maybe my Mom will give Melissa one of her homemade “snuggies” for Christmas… Update:  It took two days, but someone hauled away that ugly, filthy plastic water table.  Which gets me thinking:  I might have to experiment to see where people draw the line on picking up “free” stuff from the curb! 

  • Day 22 – Chuckleberries! (Give)

    Day 22 – Chuckleberries! (Give)

    I have found a box full of items which might be much tougher to part with than the average book has been.  These are souvenirs with real significance.  I know we, as a family, will be able to store a few things long term while we’re in Haiti (and anywhere else God directs), but it will need to be stuff that fits in a few small boxes.  Some of these items might get that privilege. But I did find one or two things here that would be easy to part with.  I took a plastic cup labeled “chuckleberries” to Kate and Storly’s in the evening for their movie gathering.  It’s the old snake-in-a-can trick and their oldest daughter got a kick out of seeing her parents’ reaction to opening it.  A few of the folks who were on the Haiti mission team gathered to watch the movie “Hannibal”.  I had never seen it before because … well, it’s just not my type of movie.  But it’s one of Storly’s favorite movies.  We had discovered this fact while sitting in a restaurant in the Chicago airport waiting for our connecting flight on our way down to Haiti about 7 weeks ago now.  Storly had us all laughing with his proclamation that “Hannibal” was a “beautiful” movie which was so “clever”!  Most of us had never seen it, but knew it by reputation and found it hard to swallow that it was either beautiful or clever.  After seeing it for myself now, I can safely say that “Hannibal” is … not my type of movie.  The chili and the cake were excellent though!  Beautiful, even…

  • Day 21 – Water Table (Give, and if not, Throw)

    Years ago Melissa brought home a large plastic outdoor water table.  I believe we were living in Indianapolis at the time.  Caleb and Hannah played with it a bit when they were toddlers, but it was hard to keep the thing dirt and mosquito free.  Ever since we moved into our current house, the thing has been lying on its side against the garage.  It irritated me no end because dead leaves and … muck … would collect behind it.  So now it is out on the curb in hopes someone will take an interest in it and adopt it.  If nobody does, I guess I will finally find out if it will fit in a garbage can. We finally got a bit productive today around the house.  There are plenty of jobs that will need to be done before we can put the house up for sale.  Melissa spent a good part of the day cleaning out the laundry room.  She also took several bags of stuff to Goodwill.  I started work on the upstairs bathroom.  The caulking around the tub needed to be replaced and there’s a small section of the wall that was water damaged.  Eventually the walls need to be repainted.  I also got the back yard leaf-free, so that feels good.  So much to do still and so little energy! Tomorrow I get to tell our church about our trip to Haiti.  I only get three to five minutes, but part of the announcement is that we will be gathering on December 5 to share stories and pictures for an hour and a half.  Not sure what I’m going to say yet, but I’ll think it through before I hit the sack tonight.

  • Day 20 – Ancient Stereo System and Speakers (Throw) and Black Friday Fun

    It’s Black Friday and, for the first time ever, I participated in the madness.  My wife and I have agreed not to buy anything for each other for Christmas beyond a few stocking stuffers since we are trying to reduce the amount of things in the house AND save money.  But we had been considering how useful a laptop computer could be for work now and for travel once we head overseas.  There’s no way we’ll be lugging a desk top computer to Haiti.  So Walmart had special prices for a couple of laptops within fairly easy reach; one was $200 and the other $300.  I volunteered to go to the store at midnight and wait in line until 2:00 AM to get a wristband with which Melissa could return at 5:00 AM to claim the computer.  They ran out of the cheapest model early (which elicited a fair amount of cursing from my compadres in line!), so I was bumped up in price range, but it all worked out.  So now I can sit at the kitchen table to write… if I want to … and I do, because my lower back is killing me and this is the most comfortable place to sit right now! My Black Friday experience was not quite as bad as I had expected – although I didn’t get to sleep until 3:00 AM so I’ve had a rather unproductive day otherwise.  Overall, it just had a weird feel to it – I guess because of this odd juxtaposition of generosity and greed.  Parents and grandparents were grabbing up hundreds and even thousands of dollars of merchandise to put under their Christmas trees.  Very generous … but where does it cross the line, turning into greed on the part of the giver and feeding the greed of the receiver?  Last year I was reading a chapter a night with the Drama Queen (now age 8) from “Little House on the Prairie”.  We hit the section describing their Christmas celebration and Half Pint told all about how excited she and her sisters were to receive an orange, a new penny, and a heart shaped cookie with icing (again, my memory may be shaky, but it was something like that!).  Melissa and I decided a few years ago to limit each of our kids to three gifts under the tree, and even with that, it sometimes takes several days before the kids have removed all of their toys from their packaging.  And it seems like the more they get, the more territorial they get over their toys.  My Throw of the day was a “stereo system” that played both cassettes and CDs – dating from when CDs were the newest technology around.  I haven’t actually used the thing since we lived in Pensacola.  Dats almost pulled the thing down on top of his head from a shelf once; he was rolling around in his walker, got ahold of the cord, and yanked.  I dashed across the room and caught the falling speaker just inches from Dats’ big round pumpkin head. I bought that stereo while I was in college.  If I hadn’t stayed up until 3:00 AM, I’d tell you about it…

  • Day 19 – Bowl and Vase (Give)

    Day 19 – Bowl and Vase (Give)

    We spent our Thanksgiving Day with Melissa’s family.  At the last minute before leaving our house, I was looking for something to take along with us to give to some unsuspecting family member.  I pulled a bowl out of our kitchen and a matching vase out of a cupboard and asked for my wife’s approval.  She said, “Dee gave us those for our anniversary one year, you know….”  She paused, looked at my face and then continued, “I know: we can’t keep everything.”  Dee was the secretary at the last church I served as youth pastor.  I may be wrong, but in my experience there are only two types of church secretaries:  Angels and Demons!  Dee was definitely an Angel type.  She held that church office together and enabled the ministry of the church to go forward on a daily basis.  The set got split up just after dessert and before the families scattered:  Aunt Sandy took one piece and Aunt Debbie took the other. And, Dee, if you should happen to ever read this, please know that we got quite a bit of use out of that bowl.  Not so much out of the vase… my wife hardly ever buys me flowers.

  • Day 18 – Nerf Gun (Throw)

    Dats (age 9) brought a nerf gun (from his nerf gun collection) to me because it was jammed.  It’s one of those guns that spans about two feet in length and fires multiple darts from a cartridge.  I worked on that sucker for at least 45 minutes.  I removed about ten tiny screws but still got nowhere near the problem – the part that was jammed was stuck in place over a key screw.   It’s hard for a dad to admit when he can’t fix something!  But in defeat, there was this consolation:  one more thing out of my house. After wasting so much time on that hunk of plastic, I took relish in breaking pieces off the barrel of the gun before I tossed all the pieces into the trash can.  It brought back a childhood memory.  It’s not a particularly pleasant memory, but it was a valuable lesson that stuck with me.  I was maybe 7 or 8 at the time and my brothers and I had one unjammed dart gun between us.  The darts were the pre-nerf type which were just orange plastic sticks with a suction cup at the lead end.  I recall that we were in the kitchen having a heated disagreement over whose turn it was to use the gun.  Now at 42 I can completely empathize and even admire my dad’s solution, but at the time it completely shocked us all silent and struck a certain level of fear in us … but it did succeed in preventing similar disagreements (at least within dad’s earshot) for months to come.  Dad walked into the room after several minutes of our fight, asked for the gun, examined it briefly, and dropped it to the kitchen floor.  He didn’t play detective or flip a coin; he dropped it to the floor.  As his boys stood in a circle around him gawking, he taught us a lesson in problem-solving.  He brought the heel of his foot down on top of that gun with the full force of his 6’5″ German-farmer-type frame. leaving only quarter-sized fragments of orange plastic behind … which he told us to clean up.  Then he turned and walked away.  Without lecturing us, dad taught us a lesson that I have tried to pass on to my kids.  It is best summed up in a bumper sticker I once saw … maybe you’ve seen it too:  “LOVE people – USE things”.  I love that slogan because it’s a masterful use of language:  in four words it conveys a profound, positive life lesson while also implying the negative – we tend to do the reverse.  Why do I have to keep relearning this lesson throughout my life, even as I teach it to my kids??

  • Day 17 – Crossword Puzzles, Books and Underwear (Give)

    No, not mine.  I still need mine, but the Princess recently outgrew her first set of underwear.  Fortunately, we have several friends with young kids of various sizes and ages and we tend to pass clothes around – until they get worn out.  It’s good to see clothing get a second life – especially when I remember some of the kids in Haiti who were lacking clothes or wearing outfits that were way too snug.  We got the chance to watch Steve and Keri’s kids for a while this evening while they had a couple of things to do.  Believe me, it’s no sacrifice:  her kids come in and they disappear into our kids’ bedrooms to play and Melissa and I can actually have an uninterrupted conversation!  When Keri returned to pick up the kids, she and they ended up joining us for dinner and then taking home a small stack of books that our kids cleaned out of their rooms this past weekend.  We have children’s books flowing off the shelves.  We are blessed in how much our kids love to read.  The crossword puzzle book was something I found in a drawer the other day and had sitting on my desk now at school.  During a mid-day passing period, one of my former students came bopping up to me and said, “How about giving me a piece of candy for Thanksgiving?”  I said, “It’s not Thanksgiving.”  She replied, “Well, you got something besides candy?”  “You like crossword puzzles?”  “Yup.”  “Here you go.”  She thanked me, turned on her heals and bopped back out of the classroom.  One more thing out of the house! Update 1:  My little 8th grade boy came in before the school day started to claim the plaque I had displayed yesterday, so it falls officially into the category of Give rather than Throw.  When he came to class in the afternoon, he announced that he had taped it up inside his locker.  What?  All I know is that the words of Jesus, typo notwithstanding, are now displayed in a student locker… and that’s pretty cool.  Do you suppose Isaiah 55:11 applies?   “So is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” Update 2:  The table and chairs were picked up by somebody within 24 hours of being placed at the front curb. Update 3:  Craigslist has garnered only a single nibble so far on the crib set.  I might have to put it in the local paper.  I’d like to have it out of the shed.