The Houghs: 1997, Revisited

Sunday, October 11, 2015

1997, Revisited

Back in Clare for another round of shenanigans. . .

Hi fellas.

A month ago I had the opportunity to revisit an old high school haunt of mine - my buddy Trevor's house in the country outside of Clare, which I more or less lived at throughout high school. I already told you guys about that, I think - Kris and I had brought our kids to his kids' joint birthday party, and to return to the hallowed ground of my youth with kids of my own was. . . well. . . it was definitely surreal.

Kimmel, Yours Truly, and Trevor (ca. 1997)

Anyway, a few weeks back, as luck would have it, another high school friend of ours - Kimmel - got a hold of me and let me know that he was coming up from Chicago for a rare visit. Kimmel and I are also high school friends (he was the bassist in my first band, Jeff's Left Front Pocket) and later roommates in college. He's been living in Chicago for the last nine years or so, and was planning on returning to the homeland with his new fiance to show her around and have her meet all his friends and family.

Long story short, Trevor and I orchestrated it so that everyone would all converge at his place in order to visit with Kimmel. As we continued to plan things out, more and more of our high school friends planned on stopping by, until, in the end, we had ourselves a full-fledged, mini-high school reunion of sorts.

And fortunately, none of our kids were anywhere in sight (I'll have to include a later post on Kris and the girls' outing during this time - they ended up going out to some pumpkin patch in Beaverton with Marcy and Cindy.)

Check it out, America - 1997, circa 2015. . .

Here's Trevor outside Clare's new microbrewery, Four Leaf. I met up with Trevor and his wife, Sara (another friends of ours from high school), and Kimmel and his fiance, at Ruckle's (a bar across the street), but we decided to hit this place up for a beer before going back to his house.

I forgot to get a picture of this when it was full, but I'm sure you all know what beer looks like. I had a stout, a brown, an amber, and something else (I forget), but it was all pretty forgettable. Thank God the place was cheap.

Trevor had a REALLY good time waiting around for the waitress to swing by so we could get our damn check.

Kimmel keeps it classy.

Back at Trevor and Sara's, we met up with Scrunge (middle, above) and Grit, as well as a few of Sara's friends. For the next eight or nine hours, we'd be hanging out on this back porch, which was the epicenter of our high school days. . .

When we arrived, Sara informed me she had some clothes for our girls (as you'll recall, their two girls are exactly one year ahead of our two girls, which works out quite nicely.) What's really cool about this particular haul was that most of this stuff was winter and fall clothes, and was nearly all in new condition. . .

We ended up taking three totes and a gigantor cardboard box of clothes from them. . . which more or less guarantees we won't have to buy cold weather clothes for the girls for the next few years. Cowabunga.

Living Room, McNerney manor

Jon Kimmel, slicking up bread (no idea why, now that I think about it - I don't think anyone ever ate any of it.)

Jokes.

Screwin' around with Trevor's underlever spring rifle (which takes .177 calibre pellets.) I had brought along two of my pellet handguns as well, so we (well, ME, at least) spent the majority of the afternoon/evening shooting pellets and BBs off his back porch and random targets (and non-targets) around his property. . .