As mentioned the Portlock Pier was demolished, and a lot of those old shaggy silvery boards were piled up on the beach. Dad took four good ones, and somewhere got a big piece of plate glass from a demolished hotel, and made one of the coolest tables I've ever seen. He notched the two pier planks so they interlocked into a base, then the glass was just set on top. It was great - I could look into the edge of the glass, which was about a half inch thick, and look into what appeared to be a big bluish-greenish "room". The pier wood was fresh as new under its outer, seaworn, skin. We had that table for many years.
Dad was always building things. He took two old doors from the house, and set them up in the jacaranda tree in one of the side yards, at two levels and right angles to each other. He put a short stairway to it, and now we had this really cool tree house. Frank Lloyd Wright would have been proud!
He took one of those rattan chair things you sit in, no legs so I guess it was meant to be suspended, from the roof of one's porch or something, and attached a pulley very high up in the branches of a banyan tree in the yard, and now we had a chair we could pull ourselves up in. It was great. He also hung a section of "ship's ladder" from the other side of the tree, for those who wished to climb. Alan could go all the way up right off, of course. Me, I had to work my way up. I felt pretty proud when I could go all the way to the top rung, just like Alan.
The pull-yourself-up thing could be dangerous though; my sister April pulled herself up one time, was lowering herself, lost control of the rope, and fell down - THUD! I seem to remember a coconut falling on her head once too. We were talking about something, facing each other, under that banyan tree. I need to mention that the banyan had started from a seed in a little hole in a coconut tree, and eventually this huge banyan tree had grown up, "riding piggyback" on the coconut tree, with the coconut tree, very tall, poking out of the top of the banyan tree's canopy. So April and I are talking there, and we heard the crashing of a falling coconut bouncing off of various banyan branches, and then it fell - bang! - right on her head! It was just like in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon - fell dull-end on, was paused there perfectly balanced, then fell off to the side. And April cried and ran off.
Dad built a fish pond, with a waterfall. It was dark green and coffin-shaped, but with all the nice plants around it it looked pretty neat. It ended up full of guppies, and I used to catch them to look at the pretty patterns on the males. One summer my teacher at school decided I'd take care of the aquarium of tilapia we had in the classroom. I took these home, and to save myself some effort, dumped them into the pond. Now, a lot of tilapia, if kept in a small tank, will not grow much. Dump those same tilapia into a pond, with plentiful guppies, moss, algae, the occasional bug, and they'll grow just fine. It eventually got to just a few very large ones.
Dad built a sort of loft for himself, with a straight-up ladder that went up the wall. There was a carpeted area up there, and bookshelves full of books. I remember looking at one about dentistry that was creepy, just the kind of thing a kid likes to read to get the shivers. He built the loft because Mom was scared of heights, and would not bother him there. Theoretically. In actuality, he'd get nagged wherever he was when he was home.
He built a sort of roof-support thing in the middle of the living room, imagine a beam across the upper part of the room going both ways, with a post from the center of that to the ceiling. I'm not sure why he built this, but it looked neat. He did railings separating the living room and the family room. He built a very nice "trash yard" which was an enclosure with a gravel bottom to store the metal trash cans we used and everyone used back then. I'm pretty sure he also built the front gate (which we hardly ever used) too.
Dad really should have been a carpenter rather than a computer programmer, because I think he would have been a lot happier, and probably would have made more too. He had tons of tools and he knew how to use them all. He mentioned several times being a "journeyman carpenter" by which I think he meant that he had skills equivalent to a journeyman, not that he'd gone through a journeyman program officially. Here I've mentioned just the things he built at the Portlock house, and I'm sure I've missed a lot of things.
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