in
Fort Collins,
Colorado.
I've told parts of this tale many times to many people, but apparently I
never wrote it all down! Well it's about time... (January 2025)
One of many
trip reports under the
SilGro home page for Alan Silverstein and Cathie
Grow.
Email me at
ajs@frii.com.
Last update: March 29, 2025
(Previous trip report: 1998_0613-20_DarkCanyonUT.htm)
Contents:
Here is the long, odd story of how I met, ended up living with and also
married to, my second wife,
Cathie Grow
(Catherine)
in
Fort Collins,
Colorado.
I've told parts of this tale many times to many people, but apparently I
never wrote it all down! Well it's about time... (January 2025)
This turned into a very verbose narrative about all the ways my spouse has added "spice" to my life -- even though it's a tiny fraction of a full autobiography (grin). Perhaps some readers will enjoy this shaggy saga anyway, given how much we humans like storytelling. I did try to include all the odd, ironic, or humorous twists I could recall... And there were many.
The somewhat arbitrarily chosen date for this "trip report" is the evening when I first met Cathie. But as you'll see the story began long before that, and it has continued long after. I mostly told it in chronological order, but with a lot of flashbacks and -forwards.
Along with my two sisters I had a weird "military brat" (US Air Force)
upbringing. Half of the time we lived "overseas", including
Germany
and
Japan
and we moved frequently, occupying about 17 different residences before
I left for college. We dwelled in a rental house near relatives in
North Miami Beach,
Florida
during my senior year of high school... Because at that time my father,
Jack Silverstein,
was "stationed remote" in
Saigon
and later
Thailand
during the end of the Vietnam War.
It was there at NMBSH where I met my future first wife (and
mother of my only child),
Spring Carlton
on the first day of my senior year, in a "creative writing" hippie-style
(it was the 1970s) class right after lunch. I was used to starting
fresh in a new school and not knowing anyone. By the middle of the day
I decided it was time to focus on learning about just one new person at
a time. I recall sitting on the floor before the bell rang and saying
to the cute girl next to me, "hi, I'm Alan and I just moved here from
Japan.
What's your name?" She replied, "Spring." And I went, "Wait, what?"
Spring and I became friends until the next summer, but we never did more than hold hands a few times, like early one morning for sunrise at Haulover Beach. I was romantically painfully shy for a flaming extrovert!
Apparently I was at least an academic whiz 'cause I applied to and was accepted by all of seven colleges. For various reasons not excluding ego, I settled on Caltech over, say, Stanford. Too bad because the atmosphere at CIT was brutal and the social life, while sometimes fun, was kind of warped, and didn't help my awkward social development.
The summer after graduating from NMBSH, I left for four years at
Caltech
by way of about spending three weeks with the family in temporary lodging in
Wiesbaden,
Germany!
This was Dad's new (and unusual) third-in-a-row overseas assignment. I
flew back alone from Germany to
LAX,
arrived on a deserted campus earlier than most students, found my
temporary dorm room, and crashed hard on a bare mattress with severe
jetlag!
In the beginning at Caltech I took a lot of classes and, while I wasn't an outstanding student, built up credits as fast as I could... Especially during the first pass/fail year before GPAs began. This turned out to be a very good idea because, three years later after being dumped from my first-ever real dating relationship, and also burned out on school, I barely scraped by with enough units to graduate. Did I mention that the male:female undergraduate ratio at Caltech was about 7:1, and about half the students bailed out before finishing? We called it the, "boot camp of the Marine Corps of science" for good reason.
So I was painfully lucky on two counts: Having an actual girlfriend at
Caltech
(even if for just six months), and surviving to receive my BS degree in
computer science. No, not in electrical engineering like I started out,
I just couldn't really hack (or enjoy) that major. If I built a project
right, the design was flawed, but if I designed it right, I messed up
the construction!
Computers had been around a while, but were still in the punchcard deck and paper tape age, with paper teletype terminals and interactive access just materializing. Nonetheless I found them fascinating, resonated with hardware and (more) with software, and enjoyed learning about everything from boot loaders to object-oriented languages. (Seriously! Around 1976, with Simula.) How many people can say they've used the front panel flip switches to boot a DEC PDP-8?
But I digress and must return to the main tale!
After getting unceremoniously dumped from my first love affair, in a
somewhat depressed funk full of existential angst late in my college
careen, err, career, I halfheartedly applied to just one graduate
school,
Stanford,
and was rejected. Apparently I was good enough for them out of high
school, but not after four years at Caltech! That was OK, my heart
wasn't into grad school anyway.
I also applied for software jobs at seven different companies scattered across the country, flew around for many interviews, and was accepted by all of them. I took the one I found most appealing, also with the slightly highest pay (I think it was $15,600/year) at Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Fort Collins. I loved the idea of Colorado, and HP even more than, say, Bell Labs in north Denver working on telephone switching systems. Of course I never imagined I'd still be "stuck" in FC 48 years later! But Colorado was and remains an excellent state to call home... Even though it's getting more and more crowded... Sometimes two cycles to clear a traffic light during rush hour... Grumble.
Spring (remember her?) also liked the idea of Colorado. We'd kept in touch during my college years, I even visited her once or twice in Florida while she was busy taking classes, dating someone else, having his baby, and putting it up for adoption!
Anyway within two weeks of me arriving in FC I'd started my new job
(June 20), rented an apartment, bought my first car, adopted my only
significant pet (Misty Blue Eyes),
and Spring came out for a two-week visit. Which we extended for a full
month -- using a payphone in Estes Park -- during a long sightseeing
tour after I picked her up at
Stapleton Airport
in
Denver.
After sending Spring back to Florida we kept in touch a lot. I burned much of my new income on long distance telephone charges! (Anyone old enough to remember those?) She decided to move to Colorado -- that winter -- by driving her car out.
That's how I found myself in late December getting special permission (as a new employee) to consume all of my barely-accrued vacation time to fly to Florida, where I somehow reached Spring at her parents' ramshackle house in the middle of the state. She wasn't ready to go. I had to clean out her little sedan for travel, including a flattened petrified frog under a floor mat. The long drive in lousy winter weather back to Fort Collins, with a head cold, was memorably awful. But I was too young and naive to take it as a sign...
Spring and I shared my little apartment
in
Fort Collins,
she had her own car, and enjoyed life while I went off to work at HP
most days. In less than a year she had a (very good) idea that we
(really I) should buy a house and move there, so we did.
After searching all around town (well FC was much smaller then) with a
realtor, oddly we ended up at a nearly-new 2 BR, 1 Ba ranch-style unit
just a couple of blocks away at 618
Sydney Drive.
I never dreamed I would live there for over 23 years! (The picture
nearby is about 15 years later than we bought it.) And engineer egg
that I was, while I improved and maintained the outside a lot including
a DIY sprinkler system, I never upgraded the interior (orange shag
carpet!) or finished the large basement.
Well Spring and I eloped from my job to be married on December 28, 1978, in front of a judge in his chambers. A few friends followed from HP and threw pink paper tape. (The judge was not amused.) Soon after that we threw a house-and-wedding celebration party, got along pretty well, and had a lot of fun adventures. For example I got serious about camping and hiking in Colorado, including the 54 Fourteeners. (See for example the trip report for my final summit of the set in 1986, and many other webpages here.) But we both had latent childhood traumas we were too innocent to recognize...
Despite using birth control Spring got pregnant before we were ready.
We agreed on a "non-therapeutic abortion" and never regretted it. Some
years later when we were ready, an early miscarriage was far more
grievous. Then pregnancy eluded us for about six months until we started
gathering "basal temperature" readings -- and that very first month we
produced a classic plot of datapoints showing exactly when our daughter
Megan Silverstein
(later
Megan Hart)
was conceived! (At about 9 am one Saturday morning in August...)
What neither of us realized was that our relationship was too fragile to survive having a kid. ("Having children will turn you into your parents.") When Megan was born on Friday, May 13, 1983, Spring and I had been married 4.5 years, but within a couple more years we were basically done... I'll spare you the details, but we separated (Spring moved out) in the fall of 1987, the divorce was final in January 1988, and we began "co-parenting". I paid whopping child support and got to see my daughter 4 of 14 nights on average, mainly every other weekend. I thought things were mostly looking up, although Spring nearly moved all the way to South Carolina. During that time she left Megan with me -- and the latter came down with chicken pox! Happy days -- but also a real chance to connect and "fall in love" with my daughter, who was wholly dependent on me. Later Spring falsely accused me of child sexual abuse -- which is another long difficult story for another time.
So what I didn't know was that for over a year I was walking wounded, prolly clinically depressed. This situation got better as we settled into a more stable co-parenting arrangement, and (if I recall right) five people in one week urged me to sign up for the Fisher Divorce Seminar!
I reluctantly went through the motions of that 10-week class... And in hindsight it was a lifesaving turning point. Later I also urged my ex-wife to attend FDS at my expense, and she did! And I also took (from the same facilitators) similar "singleness" and "couples" classes -- the latter with two-year significant-other Sherry Perkins, although we didn't quite get married before she eventually dumped me -- and I even volunteered to help with some of those seminars too.
As you'll see in a bit, FDS was one of two main connections I first made with my future second wife.
Before the divorce was even final a female co-worker at HP (who I'd actually interviewed earlier and helped hire) snagged me out of my funk for a whirlwind romance... That lasted less than six months before she dumped me for another (male) HP co-worker (who I'd also interviewed and hired). Well that was awkward!
This rebound relationship set the tone for the next 10 or so years of my
life. I was active in some singles groups, had a lot of fun and
adventures (including a
first trip
to
Lake Powell,
Utah
with them in 1989)
even learned to dance a little (more about that in a moment), bought
into that Lake Powell houseboat in 1990 and spent a lot of great times
exploring that enormous reservoir in
Glen Canyon...
Plus wobbled through a series of mostly short-lived love relationships
where I was almost always the dumpee. (The notable exception for
duration was nearly two years with Sherry, mentioned above, before she
dumped me in September 1991 by not showing up for a houseboat trip...)
During my long tenure in the Fortress of Solitude -- actually my worst duration of complete singleness was about 1.5 years but it felt like forever -- somehow I got into contra and square dancing, and even a little waltzing. Not that I have any natural grace or rhythm (remember I'm an engineer for a reason), but with a live caller, walkthroughs, and the nature of the activity, I could enjoy it... Mainly because it didn't matter much where your feet went, just your body and hands, and there was a strong beat that was easy to follow. Also these "just show up" events were great for socializing and a little innocent human contact. Plus the group often went out (late) for snacks and conversation after Saturday night dances ended.
As you'll see in a bit, contra dancing was the other of two main connections I first made with my future second wife.
When I moved to Colorado in 1977 to start work at HP, I never dreamed I'd still be here 48 years later. I spent my entire working career in town, in fact all of my serious jobs right on the HP campus on Harmony Road. But there was always at least one good reason not to move away! There was my job, my first marriage, and after that, my daughter, plus of course still my job (less a travel-filled six-month LOA in 1994) and my house.
When I met Kathy Glatz in 1998 (she's coming up soon) who lived far away in Denver, it might have crossed my mind to relocate down there, but we didn't last long enough to seriously consider that. When indirectly thanks to Kathy I met my future second wife Cathie Grow (see, I'm finally getting there!), who lived even farther away, I fantasized about leaving HP and starting fresh somewhere at the Denver Tech Center, where she already worked, but that didn't pan out either; more on that soon.
Getting a bit ahead of the story, I still stuck around FC... Even after Cathie moved up here and also worked for HP -- but then I got laid off -- but she was here now. And then I bought the house next door to her, and ten years later sold it and moved in with her (having gotten hitched long before that), and then we both retired and we're still living there -- so there you go!
As mentioned above, thanks to a hilariously fraught
singles group houseboat trip
in 1989, I "discovered"
Lake Powell,
Utah,
and the next year, nudged by an HP friend, we bought into the boat and
starting running our own trips. This was quite a lifetime experience,
occasionally epic! Through 2010 we (and later I alone) conducted 45
vacation trips on the Wildwind I or later Wildwind II (replaced in
2001),
ranging from 3 to 8 nights each, with crews of 3 to 18 people! Plus
many springtime "work weekends". I created webpages about
Neat Hikes at Lake Powell
and
"Houseboating 101",
and even got some locations in
Glen Canyon
formally named.
These houseboat trips were always non-profit, shared-expense outings for anyone I knew who wanted to attend. Over 100 different people joined me on at least one trip. Oddly though, many of them were not previous acquaintances... Some of those felt too poor to spend $200-500 on a week's vacation, while those rich enough were often too busy with other endeavors. Quite a few of my crew were "new Lake Powell friends", and about 5 of them ended up "graduating" and buying their own shares of the Wildwind or some other boat for themselves!
Also oddly, for various reasons I could "never" get one of a series of girlfriends to join me on a houseboat trip. It didn't finally happen until 1996 (7th year as an owner), with Judy Kennedy, and yeah that really added to my experience on the lake! (Never mind that she also dumped me within a few months and never returned to the lake with me.)
After I met Cathie (remember this is really a story about me and her, grin) in mid-1998, she became one of my most frequent houseboat cruisers. (Well actually I used to advertise, "it's not a cruise, it's an adventure!") She participated in 17 of my outings, second only to HPites John Yockey (21 trips) and Doug Baskins (20).
And you know what? When I met Cathie she didn't know how to swim. I taught her that myself! On the shoreline at Lake Powell, in its warm summer waters. Which enamored her so much, later she bought an outdoor hot tub at home. Which after some years she lost interest in using... But (in 2025) I still do myself, once or twice a week! As you'll see this became a pattern. Cathie introduced me to a lot of stuff I never would have considered otherwise. This included basic tools like hedge trimmers, leaf blowers, and... "When I met Cathie she had two circular saws and I had none, so I bought one from her."
Anyway after a final trip as owner that was both fun and disasterous, I sold my share of the Wildwind II in 2010.
OK so backing up a bit, now it was late 1997 and I'd pretty much given
up on dating! "I'm just not good relationship material... From now on
it's just you and me, God!" And I really meant it, and was at peace with
it being that way. I still went to contra and other dances, and of
course always still looked for (often solitary) adventures.
This
included signing up for a winter cross-country lodging and skiing trip to
Yellowstone NP
with the
Colorado Mountain Club.
The bus out of
Denver
picked me up near FC.
Along the way north I met
Kathy Glatz,
who was also a contra dancer (as well as a registered nurse!) But we'd
never crossed paths because I only did it in
Fort Collins,
and she lived 65 miles south. As a person who also hates spending time
"commuting", I'd also jokingly decided that "I don't date outside my
zipcode." (Based partly on one interlude with a lady from
Greeley.)
So imagine my surprise when, for the first time in my life, I quickly
entered into a "casual fling" with someone new -- at the lodge in
Yellowstone no less! Despite persevering through a head cold to ski
and walk around as much as I could, somehow she and I hit it off, and
within three days and nights, we were an intimate dating couple. Whoa!
So what does this have to do with meeting Cathie later? Everything, as you'll see in a bit.
After the Yellowstone trip Kathy and I found ourselves emotionally entwined but physically dwelling and working 65 miles apart. Somehow we made this mostly tolerable for about nine months, including some major adventure outings together like this long backpacking trip, and this Colorado hiking trip, and this weekend in Wyoming, and even this Thanksgiving houseboat trip. But Kathy was not happy that I wasn't very happy driving all the way to Denver to see her, so she mostly came north to spend time with me (thanks).
Due to this and some other tensions we broke up by the fall. Or rather, to be honest, in this case I was the unhappy (and guilty) dumper who tried to be gentle. We continued to be mostly friendly for years afterward while she returned to a previous love interest. This friendship included a preplanned Christmas trip together, including my daughter Megan, to visit Kathy's parents in Pennsylvania! And in 2005 Kathy invited me to join her on a free OARS river trip down the Main Salmon in Idaho, wow.
After all of the preceding foreplay, this story has finally arrived at the night I met my future second wife!
There were related dance groups in various places around the country. Once on a business trip (after this time) I even attended a (strangely different) contra dance in Concord, Massachusetts. Local examples were FOTD (Friends of Traditional Dance) in Fort Collins, and CFOOTMAD (Colorado Friends of Old Time Music and Dance) in Denver. But in mid-1998 I'd never yet been to a dance away from home.
Thanks to Kathy, that changed! One Saturday night in June, motivated by many drives south anyway to Denver (as much as I hated long commutes), I drove myself all the way to Boulder for a contra dance night. Did I join Kathy there? No! Because strangely enough Kathy was presently on a three-week medical mission to Nicaragua! (Remember, she is an RN, and a very generous and caring person.) I guess I must have been lonely or something?
That night "alone" at the Boulder dance I did meet Cathie Grow. She'd driven up nearly as far, from Aurora in southeast Denver. It was normal to "grab a new partner" for every dance. I'm pretty sure we even joined up for one round. More memorable though was talking with her post-event at a Bennigan's restaurant in Boulder (may the departed chain rest in peace), sharing a "Death by Chocolate" dessert!
(Years later in 2003 I bought seven of those delicacies for our wedding rehearsal crowd in Fort Collins. And it became an anniversary tradition for us for many years... Until Bennigan's went bye-bye and we had to switch to Olive Garden. Fortunately you can still get a free celebratory Chocolate Lasagna from the latter... Value $10.95 in 2025!)
Over dessert while comparing notes, we discovered we not only had in common contra/square dancing, past divorces (her second one was a few years back in Kentucky), graduating from the Fisher Divorce Seminar (in far different locations), and technical jobs -- me at HP, and her as a dispatcher for PC support company called Vanstar. So naturally both being single and around the same age (more on that in a moment), we swapped email addresses. And naturally when she tried to write to me later, it bounced for some reason! So that was that for a while...
Later that same summer or fall I joined a weekend overnight dance retreat at a Methodist (I think) camp on Buckhorn Mountain northwest of FC. And who do you suppose also made the much longer schlep from home to be there? "Hey, I remember you!" -- It was Cathie.
We swapped email addresses again and this time started a long back and forth conversation over the months that followed. Somewhere along the way we compared notes and were amazed to discover that, while we were born worlds apart -- me on Turner Air Force Base in Albany, Georgia, and her in Denver -- she entered the world just one month and two days after I did! Anyway Cathie was dating someone else, and I was still with Kathy, so it was all rather innocent, even charming. I don't think we met again in person until...
So here I was in late 1998 breaking up gently as I could with Kathy (who lived far outside my zipcode) while email chatting back and forth with Cathie (who lived even farther away), clueless of what the future held for us. Well one winter day in the middle of January Cathie decided she was gonna drive all the way up to Fort Collins for a contra dance. Really it was totally innocent when I nudged her to spend the night at my house afterward instead of driving back home very late. I mean, I liked her, and I had a guest bed and all...
One pleasant thing led to another. I recall after the dance sitting in front of the wood fireplace in my first house, drinking wine and talking with her until the wee hours. Beyond that though, it was all quite low-key... Even when afterward we started taking turns visiting each other on most weekends (75 miles one way!) We agreed that we liked each other and enjoyed spending time together, but would take the rest slow. After all, living that far apart meant any long-term relationship was doomed, right? This curbed any heated expectations. And we both knew the joke from the divorce seminars: "I will always love the false expectations I had of you."
I liked Cathie a lot, and she grew on me enough to endure those long drives every other weekend to spend some more time with her. We proceeded very slowly, and basically took turns visiting each other nearly every weekend for about a year and a half, plus a few travel outings together. It was entertaining, like dropping in to have breakfast with Cathie on the way to the airport. But of course with her living so far outside my zipcode we couldn't expect it to last... I figured we'd grow tired of each other soon enough and it would just be a pleasant interlude.
...even when in late February she invited me to see her 3-acre mountain property at 10,100' on Michigan Hill in South Park, Colorado. She and her previous husband bought it a few years earlier, and she'd kept ownership of it from the divorce (when he stayed in Kentucky). We dropped by one day while returning the long way from skiing together at Keystone.
Much later (not until July 3) we camped out together up there and
started making sense of the cluttered, dirty interior of the empty,
unfinished 2-car garage on the lot, full of dead mice and junk that was
stored from when they'd moved to Kentucky.
After years of hiking in
Colorado
including lots of time off-trail, that mountain lot didn't impress me
much with its large grey piles of 15-year-old deadwood (from when the
previous owners cleared for the driveway, garage, and future house site)
that was barely starting to decay. Well I borrowed a pickup truck from
a friend and used it to haul a little lime-green jelly-bean 1972 Compact
Junior camping trailer
(with a wonky wheel we had to adjust first) from Cathie's house in
Aurora
up to the mountain garage. We did a lot of cleanout and left the
trailer stored in one of the bays for, as it turned out, 11 years as an
inside-inside bedroom. That is until July 2010 when, in the course of
hand-finishing the interior a little at a time (mainly ~2003-2013), we
hauled it back down to where she now lived in FC. (But that's a much
later chapter beginning in 2003.)
By the spring of 1999 it was clear we were a long-distance dating couple, finding ways to enjoy life together, such as going on a gnarly river trip in Utah. My log says we shared a fair bit of downhill and even cross-country skiing together in the first few years. We even did a major snowy driving excursion (but no trip report) to the Grand Canyon and back with her shotgun buried in the back of the car -- just in case, since Y2K was imminent -- and we were sure to get home before New Years Eve.
Cathie had always been a dog owner. At one point we figured out that
for 33 straight years she'd always had 1-2-3-4 dogs, whereas I'd only
been owned by one cat who was long gone. When I met Cathie she had two
big Labradors... A ditzy blonde named Missy, and a midnight black rogue
named Shadow.
I had fun going on walks with her and them... Also trying to train them
in her back yard... Which was pointless as it turned out. Missy was
too dumb to learn anything new, while Shadow was too smart to get with
the program!
Somewhere along the line Cathie's local small company employer, Vanstar, was gobbled up by Inacom, which itself turned out not to have much of a lifespan (but that's the next chapter). Meanwhile Cathie and I had other travel adventures together while we were long-distance dating -- but taking it all very slowly and never expecting much. Such as, we visited a "ski condo" in Dillon at least twice... We did talk about how maybe I could/should quit HP, sell my old house in FC, and relocate south to join her in Aurora. But that's not how it turned out!
I don't think Inacom lasted very long after they bought out Vanstar. They went under rather abruptly leaving Cathie unemployed. (But she did get some nice huge garage shelving units out of the deal, grin.) Cathie hunted around and found a new job in southeast Denver (Aurora). But they didn't start her immediately. During one visit her way with my bicycle, we even took a long ride to check out where she was to be employed... Only to learn after about three weeks that the new company had placed a hiring freeze for over 40 interviewees, and nothing was happening!
Not long before that Cathie had completed a technical CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Administration) class. This bit of joy on her resume, along with attending an HP "job fair" up north, sufficed for them to make her a fine offer to work at a call center in Loveland! It would be challenging but educational for her, plus get her in the door at HP, so she took it.
Well now, that changed everything. Cathie started the new HP job and for a while she stayed with me most weeknights in FC -- while leaving her two dogs home alone for days at a time in Aurora. They had food, water, a fenced yard, and a dog door. They also had some adventures getting loose twice! One time someone drove into and knocked down a part of the fence on her corner lot. Each time (smart but unruly) Shadow was found patiently waiting at home, while (blissfully unaware) Missy got lost for a couple of scary days.
During this summer I helped Cathie search for a new home in
Fort Collins.
First she found a FSBO (for sale by owner) house a few miles south of
town (farther from my abode) on
Ruby Drive.
During these negotiations I bought an oversized
chocolate bar and dropped into a random open house nearby to meet a
realtor and ask for some advice. "Hi, I'm not actually here about
this house, but if you have a little time can I talk with you?"
That's how I met the amazing
Tony Feist
(may he rest in peace). He wasn't busy at that moment, asked me where
this FSBO was located, and impressed me by knowing the location very
well. As it turned out we couldn't come to terms with the seller and
dropped the deal, but then Tony helped us find and buy the house Cathie
still owns nearly 25 years later, at 4018
Sunstone Drive
And a year later he helped me buy the house next door, and after that,
sell my old one! (Wait for it, we'll get around to that...)
Cathie fell in love with 4018 Sunstone, made a full-price offer, and closed on it amazingly quickly in just two weeks, even with a mortgage. (This was well before the US housing bubble burst much later that decade.) At the closing I presented Tony with a full box of 36 Hershey bars (gotta love Sam's Club) to say thank you! And about a year later I repeated this gesture when I bought my second house with his help... "You don't mess with success!" Also after the closing I gave Cathie an actual polished sunstone necklace pendant as a cute housewarming gift -- and thanked her for not buying the house on Ruby instead (grin).
Now my records say Cathie had already joined me on four previous Lake Powell houseboat trips. Alas thanks to her new job and buying her house, she couldn't get away for one in September 2000, and I had to run the trip without her.
Naturally I helped Cathie move north from Aurora. At one point we rented a U-Haul down there and drove furniture up to FC. Well Cathie really loves oak... It was a plus that all the kitchen cabinets (and door trim) in her new house were oak... Before we loaded up her old furniture down there, she insisted we first stop at Oak Express to buy more new (heavy!) oak furniture for the new house. We also snagged some carpet-covered 2x4 display platforms the store was ditching, which were useful later to create a basement "doggie ramp" up to a "doggie door" and a "doggie deck" in a window well, so her two dogs could have the run of the back yard as well as the basement.
Cathie commuted about 20 minutes each way from FC to her job in Loveland, but she didn't mind it much. Especially considering that previously it had taken her about 45 minutes on a typical day to get just 7 miles to or from the Denver Tech Center! After moving out Cathie kept and converted the Aurora house into a rental, which it still is in 2025. And it wasn't the first time... She and her previous husband had done the same thing when they moved to Kentucky. After the sudden divorce he let her keep the Colorado house, where she moved back in and was living when I met her, and also the South Park mountain lot described earlier.
So now my girlfriend lived in Fort Collins -- in fact nearly between my old house and my place of work. That saved us both a lot of commuting to see each other! Although of course from time to time we still drove all the way down to Aurora to work on the old (now a rental) place. I recall one time literally "burning out" after replacing flat roofing above the deck on a 95 degree summer day! After many similar experiences, now I try to only help her out with her rental houses -- today three of them including one kept and two later inherited -- when I'm in the mood, and a property manager mostly takes care of two of them.
It was a lot easier than before to visit (overnight) at each others' homes. We both worked for HP (me for just a while longer), although at different sites. And a funny thing happened... After more than 23 years married and then divorced in that quaint little half-finished ranch-style house at 618 Sydney Drive, I developed "house envy"! Sometime early in the summer of 2001, Cathie and I took off for a long dance camp weekend far away in Silverton, Colorado. As we were driving away I noticed a new "for sale" sign on the house next door to hers. "That's interesting," I thought but, "I can't do anything about it for a few days and it's a hot market, so I bet it'll be under contract before we get home, right?"
After a fun time together in the mountains, arriving back at her house in the dark, I noticed the sign was still up next door. So like the next day I called our favorite realtor Tony to inquire about it. Aha, the sellers didn't want to close for about three months yet because they were busy building a new home! Well that would work well for me, I could still have my normal summer before the buy/move/sell drama began. So I talked with Cathie about making an offer on the house next door. She thought that could be nice -- or weird -- "what if we split up?" To which I said, "we're both graduates of the Fisher Divorce Seminar, I know we'd be cool about it, and remain friendly neighbors" (grin).
Long story shorter: I made an offer on the house, the sellers and I dickered back and forth a little bit, and I was actually walking on a trail in Parker (far southeast Denver) when I got the call on my (early version) cellphone that my offer had been accepted. Whee! It's too bad the sellers, who also worked at HP and were generally friendly but somewhat aloof, hadn't told me they were putting the house on the market... We could have done a FSBO and saved a lot of commission costs.
Anyway a few months later the closing drew nigh. I think it was set for a Monday but the sellers needed a little more time and asked to reschedule, which was fine with me and we deferred it until Friday. In between though, a sprinkler system vacuum breaker ruptured and flooded the (now empty) finished basement! Fortunately this did remarkably little harm, mostly got the slab and carpet wet. Before I even learned of it the sellers already had big dehydration fans running and the breaker repaired. Plus all of this took place just after September 11. The markets were closed for maybe a week. I sweated over being able to sell and transfer downpayment funds to make it to closing! They reopened, it worked out OK, and the delay didn't hurt.
So I took possession of 4012
Sunstone Drive
and slowly started moving into my spacious new home complete with oak
trimmed doorways! One of the nearby photos shows both houses many years
later, in early 2025.
Eventually I put my old house (owned since late 1978) on the market and sold it in January, 2002. Tony helped us for a third time and received a third box of Hershey bars (grin). Later I figured out that I had made only about 4.5% APR by owning that house for so many years -- and that was before inflation, also ignoring significant mortgage interest at 9.5% spent over the years (before I paid it off in 1993).
So now Cathie and I settled into an unusual next-door dating situation. I joked that between us we owned a "detached duplex" with 7 bedrooms, 7 bathrooms, a 4-car garage, a quarter acre of land... And a "breezeway" between the halves! This was actually a rather comfortable arrangement for many years, except unfortunately the houses "faced away from each other" (although both towards the same street) with the garages between their front doors.
It was very nice having Cathie for my neighbor -- and later my wife. We semi-randomly took turns spending nights at each other's house, or occasionally slept apart when one of us had to get up early or whatever. And we had a lot of indoor space between us to fill with our junk! Or with guests... Cathie developed a guest bedroom (without bathroom nearby until years later) in her basement, while my finished basement hosted mostly Megan for some extended visits. She had her own bathroom, wet bar, mini-fridge, and small microwave down there, along with space to store (ultimately) about 90 boxes or other items... Until I sold the house in 2011 and made her come get all of it!
Over time I grew into taking most of the responsibility for both yards (and houses): Watering, mowing, snow shoveling, tree maintenance, inside maintenance, etc. This was mostly OK and fun since I like landscaping more than most people -- both looking at it and working on it. Of course after about 10 years I burned out, had had my fun being a mini-McMansion owner, sold my "half" and moved in with Cathie -- but we'll get back to that later.
So now by late 2001 we lived next door to each other, fairly close to work at the HP/Agilent campus on Harmony Road (I biked to work a lot), and life was pretty good. I was over a year into a fun, intense design and coding project (oddly named libJudy) with a small team. Somewhere along the way after about a year and a half working at the Loveland call center, Cathie finagled a move from down south to the legal department in FC, mainly doing patent support.
All this stability didn't last long. CarlyF took over HP and unprecedented serious layoff cycles began. My cool project wasn't panning out with profits, and in mid-2002 it was cancelled. The other three team members got to take early retirement, but I was four years too young under the rules at that time, despite nearly 25 years of HP service, so I was WFR'd (work force reduction) with a tidy severance payout but no retirement benefits. Strangely, I went out the door cheerfully! I was disappointed about libJudy failing to thrive, but eager to explore new options... Which was kind of fun, but ultimately not very productive.
First I worked very hard to wrap up my HP "stuff" and exit my job, including releasing libJudy to open source. I actually left a few days before it was required because I was signed up for a gnarly river rafting trip in early August from near Moab, Utah down the Colorado River through Cataract Canyon to Hite. During which there some misadventures that could have resulted in drowning, concussion, or losing a thumb! But that's another story (although this time I didn't write it out at length).
Soon after leaving HP I took advantage of free (from them) counseling and training near home at a Lee Hecht Harrison rental office suite... "How to write a resume" and network for a new job, etc. After a while due to my arcane interest in personal finance, I got a life insurance license with the state of Colorado and explored becoming an agent for Primerica. They had an unusual and respectworthy business model, and I met some interesting people, but ultimately I realized it wasn't for me. I couldn't find any customers among my own social molecule, it was uncomfortable probing for them, and I didn't feel good about selling (for commissions) any insurance or investment products I wouldn't buy for myself. I also dabbled with being a potential contract engineering resource for a scrappy little startup in downtown FC called TSE (Triad Systems Engineering). That also led to some fun meetings, schwag, and potential customer contacts, but no real service successes.
Fortunately thanks to adequate savings I could be choosy about finding a new job or other gig. I didn't really work again for nearly two years until April 2004 when HP called me back as a contractor... More about that later. But first in the meantime -- Cathie and I finally got engaged, and then hitched!
Cathie had attended a Unitarian church in Aurora many times. Meanwhile I'd gone once or twice with friends to services at the Foothills Unitarian Universalist Church in FC. I liked their style... I asked a friend, "what do you all believe in?" The answer was, "we believe in many different things, it's our values that we have in common." Whoa! So I read about their values, decided I really resonated with them... But join a church? Me? Nah...
Well after Cathie moved north we started dropping in on FUUC Sunday services... Took their membership classes... Signed their book to join "for life"... Started making annual donations. And we still do, even though some years later, well I guess we "graduated" from them, and petered out going over there or participating much. I mean, it was a 15 minute drive on a Sunday morning! And later they dropped us from the membership rolls!
Nonetheless while our membership was active we reserved the church to
hold a semiformal wedding officiated by another member. Somehow we
picked June 28, five years and one day after we first met. To my
pleasant surprise quite a few relatives and friends joined us, about 40
people in all, some flying in from as far away as PA or FL. We opted
for a DIY (do it yourself) wedding service and reception, but naturally
we got a little carried away with everything from food to programs to
music to a hiring friends as a DJ and photographer; to souvenir trinkets
to pew ribbons.
So this meant we were very busy and stressed out in the days leading up
to the ceremony as relatives were arriving from out of town.
Fortunately some of them pitched in to bring it all together! (I
remember my sister Lori saying, "next time, hire a caterer!")
Overall we still mostly pulled it off OK and everyone seemed to have a
good time...
We also knew the church didn't have any air conditioning, but we took
our chances. And naturally there was a heatwave at that time! I had
borrowed a key, even drove over there early that morning to close every
possible door, window, and blinds to keep in the overnight cool, and
hung signs telling people to please not open them. But it didn't help
much... A thermometer I laid on a table near us during the wedding
ceremony registered over 80 degrees! Possibly it was also a mistake to
schedule the wedding for 4 pm that day instead of, say, 10 am.
Everyone was sweating. But we pulled it off and no one complained
(much), and we even had a reception with food and some music and
dancing... The usual protocols. I seem to recall that we took off
while people threw rice outside, and we left the mess for relatives and
friends to clean up!
Now I'd been to Hawaii a couple of times before... Once for an actual business trip (a UNIX convention), and once in 1991 hoping to catch the total solar eclipse (but it was clouded out) but it was still a lot of fun camping, snorkeling, and hiking. I wanted to take Cathie there, who had never been, and so we went! But not until the second day after the wedding so there was time to clean up and catch up from that. Nonetheless I left with her for the Big Island while enduring a head cold... I'll always remember her excitement looking out the window after the long schlep as we landed in Kailua-Kona.
Finally after a
memorable honeymoon
we settled back down at home...
Well actually of course, at two side-by-side homes. Cathie continued her HP job while I was unemployed, dabbling around and doing lots of weird outings like placing a plaque on Columbia Point, and trying to climb Longs Peak again, while keeping my eyes open for a new job. Somewhere around then Cathie's friend Sue said to us: "We know lots of people living together who we ask, 'when are you going to get married?' But with you guys we say, 'You're already married, when are you going to live together?'"
As it turned out the answer was -- 2011. But first let's detour a while and talk about that mountain cabin, which became a big part of our lives together; and then about my contract positions; and also about Cathie's mom dying.
Soon after we were married we got into converting Cathie's empty-shell two-car garage on her three-acre mountain lot into a nice and usable cabin. This took about 10 years until we "declared victory" on the major work -- kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, closet -- although we continued to piddle around making other improvements for a long time -- such as packing a small gravity-fed shower stall in one half of the bedroom closet!
Cathie had long wanted a fireplace. Somehow she came across a freestanding woodstove insert. Before she moved north we nearly built a wood fireplace into her house on Nucla Way in Aurora, but gave up after drilling a few initial holes in the living room wall because it really wasn't a good and safe fit. Well later her new house on Sunstone Drive came with a gas unit -- that we actually didn't use very much after setting up the woodstove at the cabin! This began in 2003 when Sutherlands in FC had a sale on stove parts. She picked up some pipe we needed, and next thing you know, in November 2003 there I was on the roof of the mountain garage cutting a hole in it! At the start of winter... That was gutsy, but we got the stove installed and roof sealed on the same visit.
This our 22nd logged visit to the cabin together was the beginning of a
long saga of incremental "cabin construction". And 99 trips and just
about 10 years later we finished inside the bedroom closet (although not
yet envisioning that shower stall later) and decided the cabin was
"done".
We did nearly all of the work by hand! The only power tools we used were a cordless drill (brought up fully charged), and a gas chainsaw (for roof and a couple of window holes). All of the other sawing, etc, of sheetrock and paneling, was done manually, mostly out on a wooden picnic table on the small "porch".
One memorable event was the first time we hauled sheetrock up the Hill. In 4WD low my little red pickup truck had no problems blasting through three feet of snow on neighborhood streets during one spring blizzard. I figured that this would be the same for 2-3' of snowdrifts up at the cabin -- wrong! Old packed snow is more like concrete... As we learned the hard way when one day in March we tossed our gear in the bed of the truck (under the camper shell) and stopped at a Home Depot in southwest Denver to buy drywall. "How much should we get?" "I dunno, let's try 10 sheets to start with?" (They came in joined pairs.) Next: Load into truck one pair at a time. Drive up to the cabin lot. Dig out the snowbank a little off the plowed main gravel road. Blast in 250' to the garage!
...Not so fast. We got stuck immediately. I dug us out, and we tried again. And again. And again. Finally in twilight a couple hours later, as it started snowing, we gave up, post-holed about 200' into the building, and got a woodstove fire going to warm up. Uh oh, our stuff is still out at the truck under all that drywall! I laid a tarp out on the snow behind the truck, we pulled out a couple sheets at a time, covered the pile with a second tarp, and could finally haul our gear in for the night, including a couple of 40+ lb water jugs.
The next morning we hand-carried those sheetrock panels indoors. We did the first pair together, then cut them apart and lugged the rest one at a time... Which means we made nine round trips. Later I looked it up and one pair of drywall sheets weighed 104 lb! We had over 500 lb helping mire the truck into the snowdrifts. What was I thinking?
Anyway, even now in 2025 the cabin remains "off the grid", meaning it's a "dry cabin". We bring up our food and water, only stay for a couple of nights at a time (occasionally three), and avoid weather that's too cold. Sometimes it sits empty for seven months at a time through the winter.
We both got older and found cabin life harder, especially now using APAP machines running on batteries. In 2022 and 2023 Cathie only joined me up there once each year. Also the same distance from home (127 miles each way) became a lot uglier and slower to drive (through Denver) most of the time with increasing traffic. In 2024, after we'd bought the Loveland condo as a replacement (more on that below), we agreed to sell the cabin, found a realtor, worked hard to empty it out and deep-clean it, and put it on the market... Which turned out to be so dead that three months later we yanked it off again. Also Cathie decided that it was worth it to her to continue owning the cabin after all, even if she/we didn't get up there very often. In fact now in early 2025 she's working on paying a bundle to have electricity extended to the building so we can at least run some small heaters, get better lighting, etc. Hopefully that'll increase the property value enough to eventually pay back.
And remember the lime-green jelly-bean travel trailer I mentioned earlier? We finally used my little red four-cylinder 1994 Toyota shortbed truck to haul it down from the mountains (with new trailer tires!) in mid-2010 when we were ready to finish the cabin bedroom. For a few years it lived inside a garage-tent in Cathie's side yard in Fort Collins. And we took it out camping a total of just four times... Enough to realize that my truck was underpowered for hauling it -- making, say, just 45 mph uphill into a Wyoming headwind, putting stress on the engine and clutch.
As you see the cabin story connects to the trailer story, which in turn leads to the camper van story still ahead... For many years I proudly slept on some mountaintops, and a lot of other places, mainly without a tent (just under a tarp), especially if I was alone. Sure I got rained or snowed on some, and was kind of exposed, like when a black bear stepped over me one night at the Kenosha Pass campground, or when the Hawaii state police woke me up so I wouldn't get eaten by a feral pig. As I got older I started conceding to at least using a tent most of the time for privacy and comfort. Cathie joined me in the tent on some trips, but then she really preferred the hard-shell travel trailer once it was down from the Hill. But since it was a pain to store and use, after retiring she upgraded to a camper van... More on that later.
After being unemployed for well over a year and a half, I got a nice call from an HP manager asking me if I'd like to return to work at HP-FC-UDL (Unix Development Lab) as a contractor -- for substantially lower net pay and benefits than I had as employee. Well sure why not? I said yes despite the lower rewards, and went back to work. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to "parachute" back into the same lab after such a long absence, even though it felt surreal for a few days. I ended up spending two years working with the HP-UX Instant Ignition (II) team on their software package. The contract deal was six months at $40/hour with no benefits other than access to saving in a 401k (without any match), through my "payroller" company called VOLT. The contract was extended every six months until I reached the two year limit where I had to take 100 days off to avoid being treated as an employee! Which was fine with me.
Years later I barely remember this two year period of my life. I guess it was good going into work, keeping my technical skills sharp, still making a considerable income, building up more retirement savings, and otherwise living my adventurous life next door to my wife, including continued houseboat trips. I was out in Utah 2-4 times every year, and the "commute" to Lake Powell and back, with camping and other explorations along the way, became routine.
During my post-contract 100 days off in 2006, HP called me to say they'd had a hiring freeze and couldn't bring me back in as scheduled... Oh well. I started looking for other options, and -- surprise -- I found, interviewed for, and snagged a similar contract position, with the same payroller, on the same site and for the same pay, but this time with Avago (child of HP and Agilent) in a complex internet chip Design Automation (DA) team. So I returned to work on the same day (June 30) I would have been back at HP, and in building 1 again -- now owned by Avago -- where HP's Fort Collins Division had arrived in April 1978 to open the new site! Most of the software and tools were familiar to me, and I even knew some of my co-workers from the past.
Once again my six-month contract was extended for a total of two years. Then although I didn't always love the work I was doing, Avago decided I was too valuable to lose, and hired me as an employee! With (only a slight) pay increase, but more benefits. Still when I asked, "do you all have any kind of retirement program?" They replied, "nope, just be sure to contribute to your 401k and IRA."
Within a year I received a surprising "critical employee stock option" bonus from Avago. But at the same time they were busy going IPO (initial public stock offering), cooking the books to make them look as good as possible, and then -- also to my surprise -- I was called into my manager's office less than a month later to be informed I was being laid off! Avago called it WFM (work force management), not WFR (work force reduction), but it was the same deal. I was out the door so fast that the stock options never had time to vest! Too bad, because later after the IPO I figured out they'd have been worth about $10k to me... Easy come, easy go.
Well again I bummed around for nearly two years acting semi-retired and casually looking for work, being choosy, while otherwise enjoying my life and living off my non-retirement savings. Meanwhile my next-door wife (remember her?) plugged away at her HP job. Somewhere along the line she changed jobs a second time, from the legal department to becoming a hallowed Lab Administrator. Even being an introvert, as an organizer she was good at and enjoyed this high-intensity role, making some new friends too.
Over the years at HP I'd seen a lot of income graphs that illustrated the concept of a "cash cow". This was a product we sold that was a generation or two back from the latest, but where most of the money came in until it was superseded. Getting older and closer to retirement, I began to realize that my personal cash cow was the HP/Avago "tech site" near home. I was never desperate enough to look too far away (did I mention I hate commuting?) Although I nearly settled for a lower-paying contract job... Because I interviewed with some kind of production team at HP for a position that would have paid "just" $30/hour. It looked like fun to me, and I would have taken it, but the interviewers rejected me as being overqualified! In hindsight they did me a favor because within a few months, similar to HP in 2004, Avago remembered me, called me up, and asked if I'd like to return to the same lab again, albeit back as a contractor again and not an employee, this time for $45/hour.
Well naturally I jumped at that! And you know what? It turned out to be my "best job ever", as well as my last one. Instead of being on the ugly chip pre-production tools side, I worked with post-production testing tools, really liked the people a lot more, and got to do a wide variety of fun and challenging software engineering, including elaborate microprocessor coding and SerDes (serializer-deserializer) chip "eye diagram" plotting. (Although for a few months I was summoned back to help out the old DA team, which kind of sucked, but I didn't quite quit over it.)
Cathie likes to host occasional holiday parties with a few guests. We were doing that one December 30 when, in my haste to run down to a bathroom before dinner, I screwed up on a short flight of four stairs and broke my fifth left metatarsal. The moral is: If you leap off the last step on a staircase, be sure you're at the last step before you leap! Somehow I miscounted by one -- and it wasn't my first or last time doing so on that small drop to the family room either. Within half an hour, during dinner, it became clear I hadn't just sprained my ankle, it was worse. This began an ugly saga of doctor visits, and eventually repair surgery -- but not until January 8th -- so another moral is: Try not to hurt yourself around the holidays!
Then a few weeks later when Cathie's mom died at the age of 89, at home in Lakewood about an hour away, I was still in a boot and recovering from the ordeal. But fortunately I was able to drive my auto-tranny car. We spent a miserable weekend down there with her brother on the "death watch". I was the one who called Hospice with the news after Florence took her last breath.
Cathie became the personal representative for her mom's estate, and she didn't leave a will. This was a major and stressful project for both of us for the next several years. Her mom died owning 2 homes (hers and one for her son), 8 run-down rental units in 5 Denver-area locations, a couple of open urban lots (of 1 and 2.5 acres), and some rented-out farmland and oil royalty rights in Kansas. Her heirs were Cathie, her younger brother Bill Wegrich, and their older half-sister who wasted no time hiring her own lawyer and making the property division process a nightmare. We struggled through estate management, inheritance shares, and property retitling, while learning a lot.
Within three months I was recovered enough from my injury to make a
spring road trip to
Utah
and gingerly attempt my first hike (in fact a rough one), up
Bull Mountain
south of
Hanksville.
I also made about 25 trips to Lakewood to help Bill empty out their hoarder mother's large old house. It was so bad with dogs, mice, and mold that I usually wore a respirator to work inside, but one time had bad enough "heart problems" a few days later that I got checked out and cleared by a cardiologist! It was probably mold or something... Finally in April 2010 we reached a painfully-negotiated estate agreement that allowed Cathie to PR-deed all the properties to herself and her two siblings. And two years after that she closed the estate bank account... Which didn't prevent us receiving and having to get reissued a farm-insurance-related rebate check even later!
So now Cathie and Bill owned 11 real estate units between them --
including 2 homes, the cabin, 6 rental houses, and 2 parcels in
Lakewood
that Cathie sold a few years later, including an ancient decrepit old
barn and her mom's house.
I spent time in 2013-2015, again totaling about 25 trips south, again
with a respirator, exploring and salvaging many old "treasures"
("barnifacts") from that barn before it was demolished to clear the large
lot on which it sat. Also when the buyer of Cathie's mom's adjacent
house didn't want the structure, just the lot it sat upon, he "gave it
to us", and we moved it 220' across the street with a 90 degree
left rotation, to a too-small vacant lot Bill inherited and Cathie
bought from him.
It was a high-mileage house... Cathie's mom had bought and moved it to
Balsam Street
in 1985! But that's all another huge story I won't go into any deeper
here... Other than to gripe that, even when you receive a house "free
for the taking", you can spend more than it's worth to move it to a new
lot and put it down on a new basement foundation! We spent much time on
many more trips south just moving (and breathing) dirt because of
various landscaping issues.
Oh and after the "barn lot" (plus house lot added later) sales contract dragged on for two years with extensions before finally closing, and we moved the house the developer didn't want, and he knocked down the barn, and they started construction on a memory care center, then while digging shallow foundation holes they found asbestos in 1950s-era "landfill trash" her father had apparently allowed to be dumped there as fill material. And they threatened to sue us for a million dollars in damages. And our umbrella policy denied the claim because of the "A" word. Fortunately we were able to settle for "just" around $30k in a nuisance payment plus legal costs. And that's a whole 'nuther story I won't elaborate here, other than mentioning it in passing as part of the saga of meeting and marrying Cathie!
As described far above, after 10 adventurous years the thrill had worn off of possessing my own upscale home (really average by today's suburban standards). Being tired of maintaining two houses side-by-side, I sold mine in 2011 and moved in with Cathie, who to this day (2025) remains the sole owner of her place, and is my "landlord" (grin). Tony Feist having unfortunately departed in the meantime, I had to find a new realtor.
I spent my last night in 4012 Sunstone Drive in mid-January. I'd like to say the sale went fast and smoothly, but unfortunately -- it did not. I had to make a lot of improvements to the house before putting it on the market, and then lost the first buyer when they freaked out about a little (long-)standing water in the crawlspace that I wouldn't blow about $5k to address. (It was just bad luck trying to sell it in the spring when harmless groundwater temporarily appeared in both crawlspaces.)
Months after fully moving in next door with Cathie -- although with one side of her garage still full of boxes of my junk to sort out later -- I finally ditched my old house on July 1. Naturally it was kind of weird living next door and still seeing it every day, but I was able to sever any emotional connections rather fast, and now (in 2025) it's surreal that I even owned and maintained it for 10 years, long ago.
So after most of the estate hoopla and before all the barn-lot and house-move excitement described above, I was well into my last (Avago) job, and Cathie was mostly happy being an HP employee. We planned to join family members on our first-ever ocean cruise. And it was a biggie, from Tampa to Los Angeles through the Panama Canal! Unfortunately my father, who had a variety of serious heart conditions, didn't quite make it (sniff). He died of pneumonia without much warning on November 14, 2011.
Cathie and I couldn't get there in time. When we arrived at Mom's house
soon after, her first question was, "you're still going on the cruise,
right?" And so we did... After the funeral
we flew home, regrouped, and then back to
Florida
in time to board the ship on December 3 for a wild
14-night one-way adventure.
I brought a bottle of wine and we held a little anticlimactic toast to
Dad up above the bow while transiting the Canal...
The sad funeral excursion was the first of a total of 31 round trips Cathie and I made to Florida (through October 2024), 2-3 times a year, to visit Mom and help her maintain the retirement home that they bought in December, 1980. Mom finally sold it and moved nearer to my sister and her husband in The Villages in the summer of 2024.
Also, again thanks to cruise-loving relatives, Cathie and I joined and
enjoyed five more big-ship outings through March 2020 (yeah just as the
covid pandemic was ramping up), for a total of 56 nights aboard!
My last Avago contract job was extended every six months for two years like usual. Meanwhile in August 2012 HP had another round of (voluntary) EER (enhanced early retirement). The rules had changed so age counted more relative to years of service than it had for me in 2002, and Cathie was eligible. She decided to grab the gold ring! After just 12 years at HP she got a severance package including cheap health insurance for two more years, and a (nice but fairly worthless) gold badge that had eluded me.
Being it was much cheaper than my contract-gig offerings, I was already on Cathie's HP health insurance, and this continued until COBRA ran out. Then we both signed up for the ACA through the Colorado marketplace, and 6 1/3 years later we transitioned to Medicare. Dealing with this of course involved quite a few unexpected wrinkles and disconnects even while I was still going into work most days. Being paid by the hour, enjoying my job, and free to visit the "plant" any time I wanted, I often worked on weekends too! But also shorter weekdays much of the time too.
So now after leaving HP Cathie was home while I kept going to work. She
wasted no time buying a new (end of model year) 2012 Chevy Express 1500
cargo van and starting to convert it into a camper!
This was to replace that less-than-ideal little lime-green travel
trailer I wrote about earlier. She loved doing this kind of project and
really got into it. I liked the idea too, but not so fast! I wanted to
wait until I also quit work... But we barreled ahead anyway.
There's a fun story about how she almost didn't buy the van after all. We both agreed that it had to fit in the garage -- not the side-yard tent where the trailer was. When she borrowed it from the dealership the first time for a test-drive home, it was a little too tall to enter the right side of the garage safely... "Oh well." Then she had an epiphany... What about the left side instead, where the concrete slab had sunk a couple of inches? She borrowed the van again, and lo and behold, it fit! With maybe 2" to spare. So she bought it!
After that we spent about six months, hundreds of hours, and perhaps $3k converting that new, empty van into a double-bed travel unit. She did most of the work of course, while I helped out when I could find time outside of my day job... Muttering, what was the rush? Anyway you know you're serious when you use a Dremel to start cutting holes in the sheet steel roof of a vehicle to install air vents! Neither of which leaked for about 10 years... Before both of them did a little... Requiring repairs. Anyway fortunately we were able to find units that didn't stick up very much, so the van still fit in the garage...
But it's a very tight fit! In all three directions. The garage door barely closes, you can't get to the north side shelves without pulling the van out of the garage, and the space between the van and my car is tight. I think my car was already in the garage but had to move to the other side (also tight with shelving), the truck was already parked on the street, and Cathie's car had to move out to the side yard after we sold the trailer, disassembled the tent, and eventually added a carport.
Did I mention that Cathie likes oak furniture? She bought and adapted a kitchen counter/drawer unit for one side of the van, and shallow oak cabinets above the bed on the other side! It's heavy but classy. The finished van weighs over 3 tons, about 6600 lb (according to weigh station scales) when fully stocked for a road trip with both of us aboard... Including one or two kayaks on top of a tarp on the bed!
Anyway we took out the van for its maiden voyage ("sea trial") in early March 2013, just after I retired myself (more on that in a bit). We spent a cold night at Chatfield Reservoir SP in Denver. Only electric sites were available at the time. I can't recall if we brought and used an electric space heater that first night, but the experience convinced me to cut another hole in the van, this time on a wall above the sink area with little inside and outside doors, to run an electric cord through for the purpose. It's pretty cute, and we carry an extension cord under the back, but we've probably only used it a couple of times in a total of 312 nights out in the van (as of January 2025; together, or later me alone) -- or indoors with it parked outside, like at the cabin as part of a longer outing. Because... We avoid camping when the prediction is for it to be that cold, and we seldom pay extra for an electric site anyway!
Early in the van's life we parted with about $200 for U-Haul to add a towing receiver to it (and I wired up connectors). We've only ever used it once for towing, but it was a biggie, selling and delivering that old lime-green trailer to my long-time friend Jenny Pruett, who at the time lived in Los Alamos, New Mexico! So that was an adventure too.
We also bought a hitch-style bike rack for about $100, and only ever used it once either! Hauling bikes around just didn't seem worth the trouble, more often it was one or two kayaks (inside). Eventually I gave that rack away to another friend, Sue Wolber (RIP Nov 23, 2024, sniff), who left it on the back of her Toyota Prius(!) for long-distance bike tours!
Cathie was already enjoying her freedom, in part due to her rental house and inherited oil royalty income, while I plowed through the last six months of what turned out to be my last job. Roughly in January, after I turned 57, I had to decide if I wanted to keep working, either as an employee or after a company-mandated contract break, or just quit and be done with it. I was having enough fun that it wasn't immediately obvious, and I liked the paycheck.
But wow, my financial situation was pretty good, and it could support me exiting the workforce now. It didn't look that promising just a few years earlier, but constant frugality, maxing out saving into broadly-diversified, low-cost investing, and a little luck on the timing, had paid off. Having "personal finance" as a quirky arcane interest, I'd learned a lot, including how to quickly log my net worth and periodic outgo every month. Dividing the latter (averaged over the past year) by the former gave me a "spending ratio" at or below 3.0%, lower than the old default "4% rule", meaning I could probably keep going at my current rate for at least 25 years before adding Social Security.
So similar to us finishing the work on the cabin later that same year (as described above), I joined Cathie in "declaring victory" and told Avago I was going to retire, well at least sort of -- contractors don't get to retire! My co-workers threw me a nice lunch out anyway. And to my surprise my last allowable day on-site wasn't until the end of February, not January, meaning my final gig was 25 months long.
We both decided that if we encountered any financial strain we could always return to work in some manner. Fortunately that never proved necessary. We were able to mostly finish converting the van and start using it, along with doing other fun stuff including a few more cruises. And I dabbled with, among other projects: Participating in HP alumni financial and other email forums; being a volunteer tax preparer for 4+ years; teaching Junior Achievement personal finance at a local high school (until the covid pandemic shut that down); remaining somewhat active with the Fort Collins Rockhounds Club where I'd been president for six years starting in 2007; obtaining and sharing access to a couple of square miles of prime rockhounding land northwest of FC; etc.
After many years and trips to the
Michigan Hill
cabin we were getting old and having more trouble enjoying being up
there, plus maintaining it. (Just cutting, hauling, and burning parts
of downed trees was never-ending.) Much earlier above I wrote about
trying to sell the cabin in 2024 after we'd already bought a closer
replacement. Here's some of the story about our
Loveland
"ski condo"...
Sometime in 2020 (yeah early in the covid pandemic), Cathie's sinus and skin allergies got bad enough that we had to "try something different". At one point we even put her in a local hotel for a couple of nights just to spend time out of the house. We started looking for some local getaway destination to eventually replace the cabin. We explored some mountain cabins closer to Fort Collins, but I didn't find them very appealing due to still being long drives and a lot of maintenance needed. We checked out some possible rental locations, such as at Sunrise Ranch (a Christian retreat) southwest of Loveland. I'm really glad we passed on spending over $12k/year on a dingy basement apartment there complete with mouse droppings!
One thing led to another... On my birthday in 2021 we drove south a bit and checked the exteriors of two condos we'd found advertised for sale. One was relatively new and with a good foothills view, but no inside parking or covered stairway to the second level. The other condo, that we ended up buying, was 48 years old, very weird, quaint, funky -- and charming! Within a few days we got a showing through our favorite realtor, made an offer, and raided our savings, mostly my non-retirement and Roth IRA, to buy it for cash.
My joke is that we bought a "ski condo at Loveland" -- no not the famous
Loveland Basin
downhill area west of
Denver
-- that has everything you'd want in a destination ski apartment, other
than a hot tub -- the HOA took it out a few years earlier, but kept the
small heated outdoor pool -- and of course no ski runs! Although it's
OK to cross-country on the 9-hole par-3 municipal golf course
(Cattail Creek)
next door to the west and I've actually done that now.
The condo is also a pleasant walk away from the Benson and North Lake
sculpture gardens, and
Lake Loveland.
It surprised me how quickly we both agreed, "this is the place for us" and bought it... Even though it's 16 steps up outside from the garage through the entry door to the main level, and 14 more to the upstairs "guest bedroom". And how little we regret it now, four years and many repairs and improvements later... Partly because we can still climb stairs! We've even managed to haul in and up a lot of furniture.
I figured we might blow $2k more fixing up the condo a little. Actually
it's been more like $8k, but worth it. We also hauled a lot of Cathie's
grandmother Nell's antique furniture out of basement storage at home,
repaired and refinished it, and happily use it at the condo.
We manage to visit down there for a couple of nights about twice a
month. It's been a fun change of pace, and a stimulating opportunity to
explore and check out a whole new city by car, bike, and on foot; parks,
trails, dining, and shopping.
The condo is set up for free use by guests but, to my surprise (or maybe I should have expected it), hardly anyone wants to pack up and drive just 20 minutes and 11 miles from home to be there -- like we do. We've had a few guests for like a week, a few visitors to share the outdoor swimming pool, and in late 2024 my daughter Megan "camped out" there for 2.5 months between long road trips.
The pre-purchase inspection didn't turn up anything too serious, although there are a lot of weird old design elements. Like how the garage isn't very deep because it used to be a carport... Some larger vehicles don't even fit inside with the door closed, and our cars and my truck must be parked very carefully up against the back wall. My old car's bumper has a small "tattoo" on it from the garage door handle one time when I didn't quite pull in far enough. We also knew that the furnace, refrigerator, and water heater were all getting old. Fortunately they lasted at least nearly four more years, until the heater was the first to go... Leading to a medical misadventure trying to replace it ourselves!
Finally here we are in the far future -- January, 2025! We've been a couple for 26 "exciting" years. We've both been retired now for about 12 years, mostly doing well, but turning 69 and "aging in place". We both have lots of minor medical maladies, but so far nothing too serious. We're mostly happily married too, despite a lot of issues and stressors, mostly arising from her and her brother's rental houses. We still live in the home she loves on Sunstone Drive.
In many ways Cathie and I are complementary. In particular she's really good at seeing the, "let the air out of the tires" alternatives to complex problems, while I'm lost in the myriad details.
Cathie's brother Bill has gone downhill to the point where she acts as his unofficial guardian and conservator. This means she manages (and props up) his finances and their combined 2 homes, 6 rental properties, and 1 cabin, along with the Loveland condo that we co-own (described above). Expensive rental house issues pop up routinely. On top of paying all of Bill's property taxes and insurance, Cathie has "donated" around $80k now for his benefit in the last two years in legal fees and urgent repairs to all three of his rental houses.
One of Bill's rentals, the 1895 (but moved-there-in-1905) "Grandma Nell's farmhouse" unit on Balsam Street in Lakewood (just north of the house we moved in 2014) has been sitting empty since last April... When after about $13k of legal expenses Cathie was finally able to evict and take possession from an ill-advised tenant who confessed to second-degree murder (while he was still using and abusing the house), but claimed self-defense. The arraignment keeps getting deferred, now it's been 15 months with him out on bail.
Cathie has sunk a lot of money into cleaning out and fixing up that house but more is required, mainly meth remediation! There's no money available for that yet, so it sits basically boarded up and non-rentable. At least last summer we finally (after 1.5 months of frustration) got Xcel to replace the electric meter that the tenant-from-hell had removed (and lost) to jumper himself free power -- before the utility company got wise and cut the wires at the pole -- without telling us!
So as you can see our "adventures" continue. I've spent time down in Lakewood working at Nell's house myself on 13 visits now, including using a small scythe -- previously found in the barn, and only kept as an antique -- to whack weeds repeatedly on the large, barren, gravel and clay lot. (Bill was pleased that you could drive all around the house and park dead vehicles anywhere you wanted!) This led to some kind of right shoulder damage and lingering occasional pain over six months later (sigh). Did I mention that we're both getting older? "The leading cause of injury in old men is them thinking they're still young men."
Meanwhile "by accident" we still own four well-maintained vehicles between us, ranging in age from 32 to 13 years... Her little old car, my now rather old Subaru (just my third main car ever!), the aforementioned camper van (newest of the lot), and the little red Toyota pickup truck... That I bought "temporarily" in 2001 to help me move. But it was a great find for about $6k, low-mileage when I bought it and still is today, and it's been very handy occasionally as a backup or furniture-moving machine. I even loaned it to Megan for months, some years ago while she was attending massage school in Denver. Each vehicle still serves an important purpose for us, but of course keeping them all running well, driven at least occasionally, and registered and air-inspected, is another regular "hobby". What I call "lifestyle maintenance" tasks are a never-ending daily routine!
Until a few years ago I didn't want to use "our" camper van for traveling without Cathie. So I kept car+tent camping alone, but finally relented and gave solo van camping a try. Well now I'm spoiled of course, probably no more tent camping for me, and in fairness I recently "bought out" her share of the van so I could, for example, take it alone to Montana and back with a kayak guilt-free. (Which I've now done four times in five years, the last two solo.) I also use and maintain "Cathie's" hot tub often, even though she long ago lost interest in it...
So there you go! This was the very long-winded -- yet still very selective -- retelling of how I met my future second wife... The years leading up; most of the odd aspects of how we met, married, and finally started living together; a slew of tangential events that have made life more "interesting"; and a brief summary of where we are today.
(Next trip report: 1998_0811-17_FourSanJuanPeaks.htm)