Tag: At Home With Jeff
World Book
By JEFF ROUBAL Martinez News-Gazette Columnist Last summer, we sailed on a Mediterranean cruise to celebrate our 40th anniversary. It was a glorious three week vacation spent visiting exotic ports from Barcelona in the west to Athens in the east. Our favorite city on the cruise was Florence, Italy. Vivian and I had visited once […]
Party like it’s 1999
By JEFF ROUBAL Martinez News-Gazette Columnist “But when I woke up this mornin’, could’ve sworn it was judgment day. The sky was all purple, there were people runnin’ everywhere. Tryin’ to run from the destruction.” From the Prince song titled “1999.” I remember Y2K very well. It’s hard to believe that was 19 years ago. […]
At Home With Jeff: Good bugs & bad bugs
By JEFF ROUBAL I have always loved bugs. As a child, I would watch them and play with them for hours. My mother believed that children should be indoors only as long as they were occupied doing something useful, otherwise they should be outside. My brothers and I spent a lot of time outdoors, much […]
At Home With Jeff: Black Friday
By JEFF ROUBAL Martinez News-Gazette Columnist Like most other American families, the Roubals spend Thanksgiving Day cooking, cleaning, and preparing for the holiday – which we celebrate on the Friday after Thanksgiving. As it turns out, Friday is the best day for our family to gather. Our children, nieces and nephews have grown into adults. […]
At Home With Jeff: “Pockets”
By JEFF ROUBAL Martinez News-Gazette Columnist One of my favorite games to play when our kids were little was “What is in your pockets?” We played this while waiting somewhere or killing time. We would sit on a curb and everyone would empty his or her pockets. Next, we would see what we could make […]
At Home With Jeff: Artichokes
By JEFF ROUBAL Martinez News-Gazette Columnist My father was born and raised near Omaha. When he moved to California, Dad became somewhat of a celebrity in his hometown. His relatives and former neighbors described “LIttle Eddie” as all grown up and living a glamorous life with beaches, freeways, movie stars, and palm trees. During the […]
At Home With Jeff: Soup’s on
By JEFF ROUBAL Martinez News-Gazette Columnist While Vivian and I were camping in Kings Canyon a couple weeks ago, we made beef stew for dinner. It was the most delicious stew that I’ve had in a long time. (I suspect part of the secret seasoning may have been kerosene fumes from the camp stove.) As […]
At Home With Jeff: Things You Never Expect
By JEFF ROUBAL Things sometimes turn out as you never expected — usually to the better! In 1983, Vivian and I were living in Hayward. We were a young couple, married five years with three children all under the age of four. We rented a small, three-bedroom house on Sunset Boulevard. Sunset was a main […]
At Home With Jeff: Best of plans
By JEFF ROUBAL Martinez News-Gazette Columnist I have finished enough home improvement projects to understand that the final product is never one hundred percent what was initially envisioned. Colors look different after you get them home from the store. Dimensions must be compressed or stretched slightly to fit in with existing conditions that are almost […]
At Home With Jeff: Interesting Times
By JEFF ROUBAL Martinez News-Gazette Contributor “May you live in interesting times.” – A traditional Chinese curse One of my current projects is to build a fence between our neighbor’s house and ours. Our neighbor does not live in his house. Nobody does. The house is uninhabitable. There are holes in the roof. The gas […]
