Month: June 2013

I took a short walk along the Greenbelt in Julia Davis Park.  I wanted to see the river traffic.

But look!  There’s a designated smoking area in Julia Davis Park.  Apparently the guy I came across smoking outside of the designated smoking area was not aware of this/does not care.  I did not tell him.
 

There were a lot of people on the river.
 

I was hoping for some bridge jumpers, but this isn’t the best place to jump and so there were no takers.  But I wasn’t the only one seeing how many people were floating.
 

There are places to pull out of the river and hang for awhile.  One of them is right near the bridge I was standing on.
 

A certain brother of mine does not like all the new rules and regulations.
 

I wandered into the water and so did this friendly fella.  He wanted me to throw something, but I just chatted at him.
 

In the river!
 

It’s pretty shallow here.  If I were floating this would be a BU, FU part.  (Butts up, feet up)
 

It’s a very good way to spend the afternoon.
 

Here are the pictures I got from the bridge.  I’m partial to the individual tube, rather than the raft, as you get to actually be in the water.  I also noticed that while we used actual tire inner tubes back in the day, everyone I saw today has tubes manufactured for the purpose of floating.
 

I put 200 miles on the car in Boise alone.  Thanks to the fact I don’t have to do it every day, I do love to drive.

Mom’s house, post divorce.  I’m a fan of older, rather than newer houses, but I always liked the details on this house.  I’m not a fan of the new color though.  And mom’s landscaping was much better.
 

Simplot Hill.  This is where we went ice blocking.  I wonder if that is still done.  I just googled the term “ice blocking” and it seems it is not an activity exclusive to Boise, Idaho.  We always did it at night and I used to imagine J.R. Simplot listening to the laughter rolling up the hill to his home.
 

I drove up to Bogus Basin Ski Area, which I have not really visited before.  I’m not a winter sports person.  I was very surprised at how small and winding the road is.  It was a fun drive, but I don’t think I would want to do it in the winter.
 

The ski area in summer.
 

And more ski area in summer.
 

You are welcome, Bogus.
 

Overlooking town.
 

More views of Boise from afar.
 

Again, the landscape!
 

I love it.
 

This used to be a grocery store near Simplot’s house. It’s where we would buy our blocks of ice.
 

I’m pretty sure this is where my mother bought me the kelly green polyester sweater I had to wear for band concerts at West Junior High.  Just one block down the street was the place everyone got their letter jackets.
 

Here it is!  My first place of employment.  I worked Saturday, trading off with another guy.  One week I would wash dishes, the next, wait tables.
 

It’s bigger now than it was in my time, where that ceiling beam is used to be the wall.  It’s also owned by a different person, Corky sold the place awhile back.  So it looks a bit different.
 

One of the new things is the fan in the door.  This is a good way to get air circulating to the kitchen.  Back in the day there was a refrigerator there.
 

Here’s the sign where the specials of the day used to be written. At the time, there was no website address on it.  One of the people who worked in the business park complex would come in regularly to do the lettering for the next round of specials.  He ate for free, lucky fellow.
 

I asked if I could stand behind the counter and they let me.
 

This used to be East Junior High School, where I took oboe lessons for a time.  Don’t ask.  Now it’s a field.  At least it gets to be a field, unlike my former junior high site.  There’s a new East somewhere else.
 

Driving out Warm Springs to Lucky Peak.
 

Before I knew about the politics and consequences of hydroelectric dams, I was always in awe of this contrast:  lush water and parched landscape.  Boise left its mark on me in so many ways.
 

Iconic.
 

We spent a lot of time at Lucky Peak swimming.  The “sand” was horrible, nothing like sand at all, but the swimming was fabulous.  There used to be wooden rafts floating out “in the deep.”  Older kids–teenagers–would swim out there and frolic while I watched from the shallow water.  Later, I was a teenager frolicking out there.  You could dip under the raft and come up underneath, which was a great place to steal a kiss.
 

Green and brown.
 

Back in town, I was happy to see this restaurant was still there.  When my coworker from my first job quit, one of the waitresses we worked with took both of us there to celebrate and say goodbye.
 

Empire Lanes! (Bad picture, but it’s there, you just have squint.)  This is a bowling alley, but we went there to play pool, because they had tables that were 50 cents per game. We were horrible pool players, so a game could take up to an hour, making this a screaming deal.  There was also a jukebox and a greasy-bowling-alley food-type restaurant.
 

This used car lot is where we used to go rollerblading after dark.  The reason?  There were no rocks on this lot.
 

We met in Kindergarten and spent a lot of time together growing up.  She had the long blond hair and I had the long brown hair.  Now we both have gray hair.  It was good to catch up.
 

Our best “cool guy head nod” pose.

Maybe we can convince her to come to the 30th….

I got up early to meet a friend for breakfast and had more time for downtown Boise pictures.

This Allies of people with HIV and AIDS place didn’t exist when I was in high school.  At least not in this form.
 

They had a jar with condoms available.  Given that it was Sunday morning, I’m not surprised it was empty.
 

Oh, bad funny t-shirts.  Where would I be if I couldn’t look down on you?
 

But right next door, a fancy clothes place.  Good old Boise!
 

The Hoff is such a pretty building.  We ate my graduation celebration dinner at the Top of the Hoff restaurant.
 

It’s Lewis & Clark and friends!
 

Apologies for the lack of proper orientation, but I love that a benchmark has been preserved in recognition of Abraham Lincoln. Also that the sign is bigger than the benchmark.
 

A look up Capitol Boulevard to the Train Depot, where I spent many happy hours in the gardens on the grounds.
 

Lincoln, standing not-so-tall.
 

I mean, really, he’s tiny.
 

Unlike Steunenberg.  I guess you have to be assassinated IN Idaho to get the really big statue.
 

Darn that organized labor!
 

I’ve always loved the Idaho Capitol building.  And I loved living in a state capitol.
 

These are fun!  Around the capitol building grounds, each county’s seal is displayed.  I didn’t have time to find Ada county, but here’s Benewah.  This also made me wonder if every county in every state has a seal.  It seems a bit much, no?
 

Are they really selling these downtown Boise lofts for these prices?  Nearly $200,000 for a 434 square foot studio?  Over two million for a three-bedroom?  I don’t really believe that people are paying that much.
 

Sara, Shawn and I take a picture after our last official reunion event.  Notice that Shawn’s halo is a little askew.
 

Lori’s house, the site of many childhood sleepovers.
 

Southminster Presbyterian Church.  I was confirmed there.  It took for a bit, then it didn’t.
 

I knew my elementary school had been torn down and another school built but I wasn’t quite prepared for what I encountered.  I approached the school from the back.  This used to be the very back of the field.  Now the school is located here?
 

And!  Gasp!  It’s not called McKinley anymore? Who decided that was okay?
 

This parking lot partially covers where the school used to be.
 

Jenn’s house.  There were a goodly amount of sleepovers here too.  One summer night, we stayed up all night just to scare our classmate Ben, who was the paperboy.
 

It’s a new sign, but still the same Big Bun.
 

You know what you get to do at Big Bun?  Wait in your car in the heat for your order. And though they are fast food, it gets pretty hot in the car. I eventually turned the air conditioning back on.
 

Sara got a scotch and soda.  I got a Fingersteak dinner, which is no longer the six dollars it was the last time I bought one.
 

My second job, my first job where I worked more than one day per week.
 

Site of where Wild Waters used to be.  I spent a summer (it may have been the final summer) there as a lifeguard.  Lifeguard at a water park is the dregs of the lifeguard world. If I get skin cancer on my nose, I’m blaming Wild Waters.
 

The Fingersteak dinner comes with cocktail sauce, fry sauce and a mint.
 

Look at this!  All one’s daily calories tidily packed into one meal, lacking any fruits, vegetables or fiber.  Of the starches, I love the toast the best, as you can tell by the fact I couldn’t wait to take the picture before I took a bite.
 

We got to TAKE A TOUR OF THE SCHOOL!!!!  This was perhaps my favorite part of the reunion.

Isn’t this a great photo to begin with?  Pretty much no one has any idea what this strange black cage is, but I know that it’s what the band director stands on when he’s working through the marching band show.  But it’s not where it was.  It used to be on the marching band practice field by the track.  But now there is an auditorium there. (Yay!) So apparently the marching band now practices on what I think of as the soccer field.
 

Each class raises money for a class gift.  Here is 2006’s efforts.  Though I really took this picture because I’m delighted at the annoying hijinks of the adolescents who tossed their apples in the bird barriers, impaling the apples and making more work for the staff.  Those darn crazy kids.
 

We first went to the “new gym” which I don’t care about and thus took no pictures.  The new gym was used my senior year for basketball games, but I was grumpy at the time (and still am) that our school now had two gyms and no real auditorium.  It was all about the sports at my alma mater.

We then went to the old gym “where most of your memories were made” commented the principal.  (Ahem, sports again.) And memories were made there, though not the kinds she’s thinking of.

Here are the words to the alma mater. When I played saxophone as a sophomore I got to play this during games.  But when I switched to cymbals for junior and senior year marching band, I could sing along.  Sara, fellow cymbal player,  sang the words as written,(because she was true to her school) but I had other lyrics more befitting my feelings about the school. Most of them have been lost to memory except the last two lines, “so as we slowly puke and die, we’ll scream out loud kill Borah High.”  Those were delivered at top volume with Sara trying to drown me out.  Good times.
 

At one time, this was the stage. Boise voters are nothing, if not cheap, when it comes to school bonds.  So when Borah was built, we got this multi-purpose gymnasium where basketball and volleyball could be played as well as a stage, for plays, where the chairs could be set up on the gym floor.  The upshot was that we played all the home boys basketball games at a rival high school, because our gym was too small, and that no one in the arts was happy with the arts part of the gym.  We played every band concert in this gym, with our parents sitting on the risers and us sitting on a moldy old parachute spread to protect the floors.  We would also have to roll the piano from the band room across the stage and lift it down to the gym floor.  It particularly irked me that the band director would encourage all the guys to do this, as if it really makes a difference if a mixed or single-sex group of 20 or so adolescents lifts a piano off a stage.

But anyway, no more stage! Because there is an auditorium now!
I’m interested that they blocked the whole thing off. I wonder what’s behind that wall now.
 

I took no pictures of the auditorium, but spent some time feeling a bit sad we didn’t have access to a good performance space when I attended.  But this picture is the back door entrance to the band room!  It looks like they have a trailer now for their equipment.
 

Also, really Borah, you still have portables?  Those were there when I was there.  The one on the end was the room of the really bad history teacher who used to be the football coach.  I think the third or fourth one was my German class.  On the right is the Math Hall.  It’s apparently still called that.
 

A look from the Math Hall back at the building that had the band room.  Looking straight ahead is the new gym.  Before it was built there was a U road to both of the parking lots.
 

Oh look!  They still have in-house.  I never went, but a lot of boys I liked spent some days there.
 

I had completely forgotten about the felt flags for whenever an activity (that was a sport) won state.  Did I also mention that if you lettered in a sport at Borah you got a big sized letter “B,” for your letter, but if you lettered in a non-sport (like say, band) you got a smaller sized letter?  Guess which looked better on the letter jackets.  What do we think about that?
I do love that they still have these flags up though.
 

And I always loved these and am glad to still see them there.  In my time, there were three displays of every person in the graduation classes of the first senior class, the bicentennial class (1976–the class that one of the teachers at my junior high was a member of) and the Idaho Centennial class (1990).  They’ve since been joined by the 50th graduation class and also, I think, another milestone year.  I wished our class had been a milestone year.  I wished it even before I got to Borah.
 

Here’s the library.  Less books, more computers.
 

Back in my day, it was called Senior Hall, because all the seniors had their lockers there, not “B-Wing.”  But this is actually a picture of the school store.  At every break and lunch you could purchase all matter of unhealthy food.  Like Hostess Cupcakes, which sometimes would have a bonus cupcake, giving you three cupcakes for fifty cents!  They also had yogurt and granola bars, which was a healthy meal for cheap.  But mostly I was buying crumb donettes and the like.  Because this was not an orderly queue, but a clump of people, this is where I discovered I was very good at moving through clumps of people.
 

The girls taking a picture at the senior year lockers.
 

Quotes!  Quotes are new!  I approve.  And I was amazed and astounded that Ani DiFranco is quoted on the wall of my high school.
 

“What’s a Borah? Is that an acronym?”  Nope.
Senator William E. Borah, the Lion of Idaho!
And, holy crap, he had an affair and a child with Alice Roosevelt Longworth! (Daughter of Teddy Roosevelt)  Read all about it in the Marriage and Family section of the post.  And then read about the poor girl’s life by clicking the link.
 

Here is the blurry picture of the principal in my reign.
 

Sara at our junior year lockers.
 

Discussing how it was better when they were green.
 

Here’s the quote above where our lockers were.  It’s pretty good.
 

Back in the old gym, we attempt to visit the band room.  But first, I stop to take a picture of this Pepsi Lion who always looked weird to me.
 

Thank goodness we ran into Alex and Barbara.  Alex was able to turn on the lights so we could see into the band/choir area.  On the left were the practice rooms. I remember as a sophomore being amazed that there were practice rooms.
 

Here’s the Band Room. It was locked, so we couldn’t get in, but I was happy to see Mr. Sullivan’s name.  His first year was my last year.
 

The band room and the instrument storage room.  Good times.
 

Barbara took our picture on the stairs outside of the band/choir area.  That Alex in the top row.  Then Ang, Sara, Jen and me on the second row.  Then Jen’s two daughters in the third row.
 

The long walk from the band area to the main building.  How did we ever get to anything on time with those four minute passing periods?