me and my friend Suzanne C. April 30, 2015

with the good weather having finally arrived, (i think mother nature kept hitting the snooze alarm LOL)  i am once again starting to do some social things.

my friend  Suzanne C. came down today from Boston on business. it is hard to believe it has been several years since she was here last!

we decided that since time was of the essence we'd meet once again  were we did the last time at houlihans restaurant in bridgewater NJ for coffee and desert.

since it was later in the evening the restaurant section had thinned out but the hostess was kind enough to let us sit at a table in the now empty dinning room.
3-1/2 hours went by like minutes and our conversation was as if we had meet last week instead of several years ago when she was last here on business.

Suzanne had this "killer -stop traffic "dress on and looked picture perfect as always!
we have many other interests in common so we are never short on conversation. ie we both have a red hobby convertible sports car that gets put away and covered up for the winter.

the best part was the waitress was attentive but left us alone to chatter away. :-)
sadly the hours had flown as if they were minutes and it was time to leave before our carriages turned into pumpkins.
we said our goodbys and headed on our way the richer for each other company!

hugs
Diana

taps for my dad Dec. 29th 2014

Sadly my dad passed on as of last tue.
we had an honor guard from the army at the interment today with me as bugler (on trumpet). i used the newly acquired bach which dad had gotten chance to try last spring  the day i bought it.

you see my dad gave me my 1st trumpet lesson when i was age 9. being a second generation trumpet player it was an honor to play taps for my dad.
in fact, in my view, i felt that had if i had not played it would have been dishonorable.
my dad had done this detail many times and said that echo taps was much harder emotionally to play for. (we didn't do echo) the indoor mausoleum at st gerts in Colonia has quite an echo so i was placed at the entrance foyer entering the mausoleum chapel. i am proud to say that with Gods help i was able to play honorably.

Building the garden rail road "the Frog Hallow and Bird point Rail Road" sept - oct. 2014

 in sept due to the fact that i had to stay close to my dad after he broke his shoulder this past summer while grazing for cookies in the kitchen... i decided to actually start building a G scale garden rail road.
i had bought a starter set from a friends garage sale. it had a small engine, several extra cars, a power pack and a lot of track which was designed to be used ether indoor or out door.
so labor day i started ripping out the excess ivy near the waterfall pond dad built many years ago.
first i had to level the ground this took 10 wheelbarrow loads of dirt which my neighbor supplied when a tree fell several years ago leaving a pile of dirt he was getting rid of. next he used his pick up truck to get 3/4 of a ton of gravel dust for the ballast. this meant offloading another 12 wheelbarrows of gravel dust 100 feet out to the pond area. then there was the removing of two 8" tree roots and of course there ose one at each end of where i wanted to place the track LOL. lucky we had a warm fall because one night after dinner using my neighbors contractors light i kept working till the sun came up LOL! after much hard work the rail road was up and running.

i called it the "Frog Hallow and Bird Point Rail Road" because it starts near the pond where we have dwarf and frog statues and goes  30' up to the bird bath via a dog leg near the old fire pit.

the blue dwarf cottage on the right dad built quite awhile ago for the pond from a small artists picture in an advertisement in a magazine

as one can see i have acquired 2 more engines a Forney with sound and a Mogul.

Dad did get to see the trains running in late Oct.

Diana

a crazy 2 weeks july 25th 2014

not much to write about in diana land as there hasn't been to much time to be diana since my dad  (89) fell 2 weeks ago and broke his dextro humorius ( upper right arm near the shoulder). the poor guy is soooo right handed so that it has effected his confidence in his balance. so i have haried a college guy up the street  to help me guide my dad from the bed to the chair.

as if that isn't enough the top of the gas stove just sort of crumbled yesterday.
so i had to call and order another stove.

in the middle of all this the neighbor's main water valve broke off in his hand creating a gueiser. requiring a call the the water co to shut off the main valve . next the fire dept arrived to pump out the basement which now had calf deep water.

so anyone reading can see why i have had no diana time.

catching up on my blogs due to to much time spent shoveling snow this past winter! May 14 2014

i can't believe i haven't done an entry since 3/4 or rather almost a year ago!
 i think mainly due to theharsh winter we had. i spent way to much time shoveling snow and was just to exhausted to do any entries!
i had taken some photos with the good intention of posting them but they just sort of piled up on my desk until i finally filed them. now i will have to dig them back out
so i thought i'd better at least jot down a note or two!

 

 this was in the late fall at the local cvs pharmacy store. i really like this shawl but rarely get to wear it at the temp outside must be not to hot or to cold to wear it.

 

welcome to my workshop and studio area. i was sooooo pleased because i had decided to clean up the clutter on the table and put the shop tree there this year!

here are the decorations on my 1929 ford 2dr dad's 1930 ford roadster is in the foreground. it is funny how while i was changing 2 inner tubes how the job escalated into 2 months instead of 2 days! it started with a broken spoke i found after i changed the first tube. these are factory welded spokes so off to my neighbors shop and his mig welder. the job tube by tube and wheel by wheel just dragged. hence it was time to decorate the car before returning it to the storage garage!

the new holiday apron! i just loved the cute lil' bow bow on the front!

me in front of our christmas tree. 

(note the outfit is pre snow and super cold weather)

it was sooooo cold this past winter...

 that we had icicles forming from the bottom of the door growing upward!

this is after christmas when it got soooo cold  so out came the boots and warmer outfits. this must have been on one of the slightly warmer days as i don't have a really heavy long coat on.

and finally toward the end of the winter when no one including the gg's cared about fashion all they cared about was staying warm!

one of my christmas gifts which i picked out and i   paid half and dad the other half was a early christmas gift  a dslr camera.

now i have been drooling for 5 years waiting for a clearance sale. which target stores finally discounted for about half price. i had to call 5 stores to find one still in stock. the self timer on this camera is verrrry easy to use so i just set it on the decons bench accross from where i am standing and in 10 seconds it takes the photo.

i have soooo missed using my slrs since the demise of film but swore i would no longer buy cannon products due to the lack of support of replacement parts.  the ae1 was a great camera but they sold it to the public and tossed us out of the nest like baby birds. and when they came out with their dslr they chose to use the poorer body the reble instead of the better body the ae1 . therefore the lenses were no longer useable on the newer dslr

yet pentax and nikon  still used their same mounts and older lenses could be used. 

like from the pentax k 1000 but there are less places selling the pentax which brought me back to the nikon 5000 series.

i really love the ease of use of this camera. the auto settings which i thought i'd never use iare very good hence i almost never revert back to the manual settings.

my other great gift which i picked out and contributed to was a small acetylene and oxygen tank set from harbor freight stores  i combined this with the jeweler's torch set from smiths called the "little torch" so that i could do more efficient silver - solder ( high temp soldering sort of brazing) of brass musical instrument keys.

although the tips are verrry small the number 3 tip still puts out welding temps of 6000 degrees for a btu use of over 1200 which is more than enough for the silver alloy rod . the coolest part is it ie designed to use any yes any bottled gas source along with bottled welding oxygen. many jewelers use city or propaine yet the refrigeration repair techs use acetylene like i am using. it is different than welding on steel as one needs to keep the flame back a bit instead of in close as in welding. but with all the import instruments coming in the country i can no longer obtain some of the key parts for saxes so now i can do a high strength repair of a broken key assembley and not tur the job away.

so that is all the news for now and it is time to go to sleep.

hugs diana

finally back to the pool! july 26th 2013

well the heat wave along with the constant humid drizzly weather we have had has finally broke. yeaaaa! today was 80 degrees , sunny and a light breeze so i  could finally get to the pool in the next town.

although we who were born in nj are somewhat used to humid - hot (80-90 degrees) in july and aug. we are not used to a whole month of 90- 100 degree days with constant drizzle and super sticky humidity. when the sun was out it was to hot for the pool as the water was even to warm and when the sun went in and it cooled a bit then we had drizzle and sticky humidity. finally today and thur the weather cooled down to 80 degrees with a slight breeze. we were told that the cause of this was a   Bermuda weather mass that stalled and tried to push the currents east to west instead of the usual west to east. when this happened the entire east coast from florida to cape cod ended up with the unusually hot super sticky humidity and drizzel. yuch! usually way up north in the north east it is much cooler in the summer than in nj. but not this july!

i live only about 10 miles west of the elizabeth port which means that we see sea gulls since we are closer than one might realize to salt water (sort of the bay). this means we are still effected by the off shore currents which can change as the land heats up by the afternoon.

the other reason i couldn't go to the pool if anyone read my last log entry is that last week i needed to let the swelling subside on my face due to the yellow jacket sting on my left cheek bone area which had swelled my left eye almost shut. i am happy to report after the dr put me on a somewhat high dose of prednisone that the swelling has subsided. yeaaaa! :-) i can tell you i was not very pretty last week. forget the eye make up i couldn't find my eye lid to even apply any make up!

 although this is a photo from a past year (since i was by my self today with no one to take my photo) it is the same bathing suit, hair and pool! so i looked exactly the same.

this pool now has adult swim for the last hour of each day which makes it really nice . in fact there were only a few people there besides the life guards.

afterwords i stopped at wendys (the order taker was nice enough to take my photo) for a soda 

and the A & P food store for the evening meal of salmon which i shared as diana with my dad.

the facial bee sting july 14th 2013

sunday while mowing my lawn i got stung by a yellow jacket on the left cheek bone.

i iced it heavily used adville and took a small amount of antihistamine ( a full does puts me in a fog the next day)

well monday with my eye almost swollen shut it was off to the allergist who who ordered prednisone and when i protested he said "  without it the swelling will get worse before it gets better" agggghhh

buy now i looked like a chipmunk on the left side of the face and i know it'll take at least 3-4 days to go down *sigh* still i know it could have been soooo much worse and i consider myself lucky in spite of it all.

believe me it is not a pretty sight and  make up is not going to help this situation!

  there isn't enough makeup in the whole world to cover this much facial swelling!

so i guess that leaves out diana time and diana at the pool for the next week or so grrrr!

but as i said i know it could have been soooo much worse and i still consider myself lucky in spite of it all.