New Photos of Rich (more posted earlier)

Today is Monday and I'm over my 'feeling sorry for myself' phase for now ... I went through some more photos and have some neat ones to post here ...

We used to love to go fishing .. mostly in lakes but also on commercial vessels for salmon or stripers. Rich never believed in 'bottom fishing' because there was no challenge .. it was just a matter of dropping the line over the side of the ship, waiting, and reeling in the dead fish. He was so happy when he came home with this lovely striper ... we both caught one that day and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

He used to get up around 4:20 am and get home some time around 3 pm so sleeping was an important part of his daily routine. Dusty (on his lap) and Fluffy (curled up in his arm) couldn't wait for him to lie down and fall asleep .. he was a built-in heater for them!

When we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area (Rich was born and raised there) we never missed a 49er home game and even travelled back east to see their first Super Bowl (XVI) .. what a thrill! He'd had season tickets for years and I joined him in 1974. We had fantastic tailgate parties with friends of ours and we flew the Union Jack and the Greek flag so countrymen could find us. (Our friends were Greek heritage) Here we are doing our impersonation of the Marine flag raising on Iwo Jima.


I threw a surprise birthday party for him on his 60th birthday .. he came home from work (Saturday) and was grumbling about all the cars parked on the street .. we had a great party in the back garden and this is a comical nurse who came to entertain! I had a stripper (only down to a bikini) go to his workplace to surprise him there and I was told he blushed and tried to keep his eyes averted .. for a while.


After he retired, we moved up to Oregon and that's where we adopted our first German Shepherd, Martini. There must be something special about Rich's lap because whatever animals we had, they always ended up there!


He loved boats and sailing ... he had boats as a young man and we had a boat too .. plus we'd often go lake fishing on row boats. This was taken in the replicated wheelhouse of a Navy ship (if there's a Navy person out there who can identify the type of ship, let me know).



In Grants Pass, Oregon we went every weekend to a wildlife place where they had big cats .... and some very little cats. Here's Rich trying to give instructions to a tiger cub we were babysitting (with little success).




We lived for ten years in Brookings, on the Oregon coast just a few miles north of the California border .. it's a beautiful area called the "banana belt" because of it's awesome weather. He found a piece of driftwood that looked like a six-gun so he decided to quick-draw his son.


Here he is being goofy ... I don't remember where that fluffy toy cat came from but it certainly gave him a chuckle. We enjoyed each other so much .. there are so many wonderful memories.



This was taken at a small airshow we attended, about seven months before he died. He'd already lost about 25 pounds (which he could ill afford) as you can see by the shirt. He's wearing what I called his "Sinatra hat" ... a straw hat that he loved. I thought it added a 'flair' to his looks.

On one of our jaunts in the car, he spotted this 'dog' as we drove by .. there's a two story house behind those trees ... Even though he was legally blind (I used to tease him that if a woman in a bikini was on TV, his vision became 20/20) he couldn't miss this. They even printed this photo in the local paper because it was so unusual. We drove by the house again a few months later, and would you believe they'd cut the trees down!