Yesterday, whilst driving to ALDI, a friend of mine, dating all the way back to first grade, Linda Lou, called me with the sad news that another friend of mine, dating all the way back to high school, also named Linda, had died.
I'd been told a couple months ago that Linda was ailing bad, and that her condition was terminal.
There was a time when I saw Linda frequently, when I lived in Washington. And after the move to Texas, talked multiple times a week, via a phone, til August of 2008, when an incident with Linda at the Fremont Sunday Market, in Seattle, caused me to feel the need to terminate my relationship with Linda.
But, I do have many fond memories of Linda and the fun times we had over the years. Like above, that is Linda looking pink, in Zion National Park, in Utah, being photographed by Wally from one direction, and me from another direction.
The above photo is also in Zion Nation Park. That is Linda next to her husband, Geff. Geff passed away several years ago.
Again, Big Ed and Linda. This is in a houseboat on Lake Powell, in Utah. We houseboated 4 days on Lake Powell. It was such fun we repeated the fun a few years later, with a somewhat different group of floaters.
No longer in Utah, now across the border in Arizona, in Monument Valley. That is Big Ed being affectionate with Linda.
And now we are in Yosemite National Park, in California, with Linda the only one looking at me, with the others looking up at thrill seekers climbing up the El Capitan cliff.
I have many photos of Linda and the various places we tripped. Most of them are in old-fashioned hard copy photograph mode, not digitized.
It was due to Linda's husband, Geff, that I got into website building. Geff had a website, called MudSluts, mountain bike themed, which was picked Cool Site of the Day, which was a cool thing to have happen late in the previous century.
Then Geff took emails between me and Linda and turned them into Lulu & Durango In As The WWWeb Turns. This was also picked a Cool Site of the Day.
In Lulu & Durango In As The WWWeb Turns Geff made my Durango character be a bit of an annoying know-it-all. So amusing, what with that being so different from the real me.
The Durango nickname came to be when I would send out mailings to those going on the Lake Powell Houseboat trip, with the mailings titled "Durango Dean's Wild West Adventure".
In addition to Lake Powell that trip included the aforementioned Monument Valley, log cabins at the Grand Canyon's north rim, where we got trapped the next morning by a heavy snowstorm. Overnight in the lodge in Zion National Park, a few nights in the Luxor in Las Vegas, overnight at Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley, then Yosemite on the way north back to Washington.
Back to Lulu & Durango in As The WWWeb Turns. I was having too much fun sending Geff too much material for the WWWeb Turns website, with Geff, to my mind, being way too slow making use of the material.
I got a call from Geff telling me I needed to come to Gig Harbor, because he had something for me. So, I made the 90-mile drive south to be shown a graphic of an image of a door, on which the words "Dailing Doctor Durango" was written.
Along with that image Geff had written the HTML code for a website called "Dialing Doctor Durango". It is so long ago I do not remember how I set up the website on my own server, or how I got the URL for the website.
What I do remember is HTML code looked way too difficult. So, I quickly found a website building program called HotDog. Geff had told me I had no idea how tedious and time-consuming web code writing was, when I'd complain he was not adding content fast enough.
Well, Geff was an Apple user, I was a Windows user. With way more apps available. HotDog was easy to use. You'd make a webpage much the same way as you'd write a document with photos to be printed. HotDog made the code.
Geff was soon perplexed at how fast I was churning out webpages for Dialing Doctor Durango. It was quite some time before I confessed to HotDog being the reason. By then Dialing Doctor Durango had been picked Funky Site of the Day. Not was cool ad Coot Site of the Day, but I was pleased.
I did Dialing Doctor Durango for a couple years. It generated a lot of questions and comments. It was picked one of the Top 10 medical websites on the Internet, by some German university.
How could they not get this was not a serious medical website? Dialing Doctor Durango is how I met Wee Cheng of Singapore. She emailed asking Doctor Durango's advice.
Changing the subject back to roadtrips with Lulu, I mean, Linda. The first one of those took place when I was in college, going to Central Washington University in Ellensburg. Lulu and her best friend, Julie, came over in Lulu's new Mazda, over Spring Break. With me driving, Lulu, Julie and Big Ed roadtripped to Reno, with that being the first time I'd been to Reno. Other than Reno, the highlights of that trip were Virginia City and Lake Tahoe.
Why I thought it was a good idea to take off like that during Spring Break is a mystery to me, all these years later.
I hope Lulu Linda is at peace now, reunited with Geff...
