Author Archives: Dianne

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About Dianne

Domestic goddess, wife, mom, gardener, paper and collage artist, geocacher, local traveler, cross stitcher, baker, crafter, Facebooker, blogger, decorator and photographer.
Oct31

Happy Halloween 2012

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Halloween owl and witch shoes, originally uploaded by DianthusMoon.

It’s a cool, damp day here. We don’t get trick or treaters as we live on a busy road with no sidewalks.
It’s a rather low key holiday, though I enjoy decorating for it. Enjoy my ‘flashback’ post!

Sean as a Magician

Sean, age 2-a magician

Little Dorothy and the Halloween decorations

Tori, age 8. We both love The Wizard of Oz, or at least I think she still does.

Nephew then and now
Kenny age 3 trying on Sean’s last Halloween costume hat of a Titanic sailor and as a teen
Tinkerbell and Mom mom
My mom and 1.5 yr old Tori as Tinkerbelle
Sean as Dracula
Sean as Dracula (photoshopped)

Oct29

Places I loved all my life

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We’re waiting on the ‘monster’ storm Sandy to arrive. Today I picked up a few things outside that I thought would get tossed around in the wind and rain we are expecting within hours. We put tarp down in hopes that the water would run away from the foundation and not go in the basement. We have lots to drink, enough ice for a few days and flashlights and candles. It seems she will take her good ol’ time coming inland and staying a bit. Right now it’s rainy and a bit breezy.

So I am worried about our beaches and coastlines…we have seen on tv and FB the flooded out streets of Wildwood, NJ  and the waters covering Route 1 between the Delaware beach resorts of Dewey and Bethany. It’s going to be a mess and it’s probably going to be a while before things will be like they were when people are going on vacation in the summertime. I am glad I’m not on vacation now (if we were in NJ/DE/MD) as I’d be scared about where I am and what’s going on at home.

Brian’s a bit under the weather and I hope that Sean and him can tackle any labor this may make them go through. I won’t be able to do much leaning over as my hip has been bad this weekend. I did have one good night, not sure what I did, I took one glucasomine chondroitin that night.

Wish us well and again…we are on standby. We will be filling up pitchers of water and the tub tomorrow morning. We need the tub water for the toidy. Not fun.

I think this is Atlantic City, NJ about 1975

Sean and DianneCape May, NJ

Dianne sticking toes in ocean at night

Ocean City, MD

Rehoboth Beach
Rehoboth Beach, DE

Guys hitting the waves
Fenwick Island, DE

Oct28

Learn about words-Filibuster

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We’ve heard this word quite a few times lately and I noticed filibuster was on the cover of ‘Word Histories and Mysteries’  by the editors of American Heritage Dictionaries. (I thought I’d share these with you every once in a while).

Filibuster- A freebooter and a filibuster are from the Dutch word vrijbuiter, derived from vrji ‘free’ and buit ‘booty’. This was first used in the 16th century. The French borrowed the word and passed it on to the English in the 18th century in the form of filibustier. The Spanish got a hold of it and it became filibustero where the English word filibuster came from. At first it meant ‘pirate’, but then in the United States in the 19th century it was known as adventurer who tried to to stir up trouble between the Spanish Colonies of Central America and the Caribbean.  It was also used as a verb to explain pirate activities. The term now is used to describe the aggressive  course of action taken by legislators seeking to delay or prevent legislative action.

Photo Hunt Spooky– a church in the middle of no where  (we were on the way back from Penn State back in 2009 looking for Penn’s Cave)with a ghost story associated with it!

1885 Bethesda Evangical Church on Swamp Church Road
If you don’t hear from me for a few days, blame it on Sandy…

Oct26

Chadds Ford Great Pumpkin Carve event

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Since we’ve lived near Chadds Ford and enjoy it’s beautiful countryside, we decided it was about time we went to see the annual pumpkin carve as sponsored by the Chadds Ford Historic Society. I mean, 26 yrs is a long time not to see this artistry event. What piqued my interest was knowing an artist pal was going to carving a pumpkin. She’s been doing it a few years as has Bam Margera’s mom (the guy who does stunts, etc on his own show). It’s been an event since 1970 and it’s almost right across from the Brandywine River Museum and the banks of this river too.

This was down our road a bit. We left close to five as that’s when it started. I know after the rain we are expecting in a few days, we won’t be seeing the leaves anymore.

We got there early, we enjoyed walking around several times, but it did get more crowded.

Follow the pumpkins to the event

They had until 7 pm to carve before judging began. I asked if they got to chose their pumpkins and the artist said they got what was there waiting for them.

Jennifer lives near Lancaster. A great artist and photographer. She won ‘Best Halloween Theme’ this year and last  year.

Clever designs!

Ran into three classmates from high school also! Two from my class and one from my younger brother’s class. The three of them were meeting up here.

It got really crowded too. I drove by tonight (Friday) and got stuck in a traffic back up.

This was outside the carving area where a band was playing. They had picnic tables, picnic type food, t-shirts to buy and raffle items. Brian put a ticket in for Eagles football tickets as he and Sean have never been to a game. I sure hope they win!

I’ll be putting all these up on Flickr.  And thanks to Brian for taking most of them.

I went down today and took my mom to a  shopping center. We enjoy The Dollar Tree and a little thrift shop next to it. She then took me for some Chinese that I was able to share with Sean as I only ate half of it.

We are waiting on Hurricane Sandy to come up the coast and she will probably dump a lot of rain from Sunday to Monday. As I type this, she may be tracking in a somewhat different direction, but it doesn’t look good. I will be making some egg salad, etc to have something to eat. We will fill up something with water outside as our toilets won’t flush if the power is out. Keep us in your thoughts.

Oct25

The highest point of Delaware

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Since Sean had a night class on his birthday, I took him out to a late lunch to The Olive Garden, one of his favorite restaurants. I always mention geocaching to him and he doesn’t mind checking out a few of them. His phone works pretty good pinpointing the cache.

First we went to one in a series of shopping center caches. It was near a pretty line of trees and a golf course.

It was a quick 5 minute find next to the fence (on the ground) that separates the shopping area from the golf course.

We then did a little shopping in Marshall’s-they always have good stuff. I got a little ornament display piece with an owl on top and last night hung most of my Halloween balls on it. I got a big box of Susan Branch greeting cards (she does homey watercolor art) for $3.99-there are 40 of them!

So the next stop was Best Buy, but I stayed in the car and browsed Geocaching.com. I saw there was another cache around the corner and it may interest Sean because of his college classes.

We get to the cache which is also the highest elevation in Delaware! A lady drove by and asked if we were ‘high markers’ and I was trying to be inconspicuous and of course said ‘yes’. Well low and behold her mom is into this organization and before we knew it, a 79 yr old lady came walking across the street.

Taken by Miss Doreen (her photo is halfway down-in pink).

Doreen gave Sean articles about the high mark society. The founder is suppose to have his ashes at each marker! Down the road is a big tower that was used for communication between DE and NY.

So that was an interesting stop to say the least! Sean said he could certainly use the info for some research.

And the cache was a nano on a bench-no problem finding that one-different than Sunday!

Oct24

Happy Birthday Sean

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Wow, Sean is 26 today! I can’t believe all those years have gone by. I scanned a few of my favorite photos and the years seem to melt away if just for a short while.

It’s nice to share special times with him. These are also of him and his Mom-mom Jeanne and Girlfriend Mary.

Love this shot from Virginia Beach this past summer.

I will him luck and happiness always.

Oct23

New Hope evening

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After we walked around the woods and found the Doylestown cache, we headed over to quaint Peddler’s Village. It was a bit late and many of the stores were closing. I noticed that the scrapbook store I really liked is gone. They had really nice things. : ( There were some cute scarecrows… See the […]

Oct20

Archie’s Corner

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Since we weren’t in a rush yesterday, Brian and I did a few geocaches in the area of the chiropractor. The first one was near an entrance ramp to Rt. 1. The clues said ‘how cute’ the container was…saw nothing but what I think were crab apples and overgrown weeds, a bottle and a broken up electronics piece. I asked the cache owner about it and he said to make sure we look ‘low enough’. I’m thinking we need to look better under one of the electric boxes. We found a few others too. One near a park that is next to the hospital where I had my gallbladder out 25 yrs ago. I started to think about how much I missed my little 9 month old boy and my eyes got wet. I was in there a whole week!

We went down to my hometown and took mom to the grocery store and to say she needed everything is an understatement! Glad to help her. Brian had helped three people at the store last week, nice guy!

I ‘finally’ got to see what ‘Archie’s Corner’ was all about. It’s down a side road off of Rt. 1. It’s the sight of a former school built way back in 1838.

Cemetery notes and/or description:
Per the 1937 WPA Survey w/map, this cemetery was surveyed under the name of Ebenezer Independent M.E. Church & Graveyard (Colored). There were 79 known graves at that time, the majority of them illegible or marked with a plant, stone, field stone, cement block, wooden marker, cement cross, rosebush, or concrete block.

This is rather sad looking. Around the corner from us is black cemetery over a century old. I believe it was an Eagle Scout or troop project to fix our neighboring cemetery up and it looks really nice. I wanted to put a geocache there, but the road is a bit dangerous and a lady at the preserve office said they like to keep it private.

So back to Archie’s Corner-it’s named for the first ordained preacher, Lydia Archie.

The little school house is about as big as a 12′ in diameter bedroom.

The hint was it was in a corner. We actually looked at GZ, but as you can see it was getting dark. We looked one more time and Brian saw it wedged in the corner near the stone wall. He had a heck of a time getting it open too.

Not much in the box, but since it’s about 10 minutes from here, I can surely go back and add stuff. I took the little duck in the above photo. I would like to drop a travel bug in there too.

Instagram is so popular, I made one of the quarter moon last night. I swear there are owls in that one tree.