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.
Aug14

Someone was watching from above

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Today I was trying to get a hold of my mom for a few hours. Finally I called my brother, the one who lives around the corner to go check on her if he could. He said she was at his house. Well she was just there with us yesterday with Brian and me.  He had to go get her in our hometown. She had been leaving the bank and was carefully going into the intersection when a woman in her 40s broadsided her! She started to spin and saw she was heading for another car and lady and turned the steering wheel hard and missed her by inches. She was seat belted in as far as I know and is fine. They had a hard time getting her out of the car at the door got stuck shut. And the car’s right axle is bent, so her 21 yr old car is totaled. I don’t know how the lady could not see a blue sedan. I am so thankful she is fine. She was choking up tonight as she really liked the car. Ahhh. Scary for an almost 82 year old.

Brian went for the interview today. It’s a food store and only part-time. The woman said they only hire p-t. So he will  probably take it, though his hours will range from 12-30. I think he’ll have the ‘early bird special’ hours. It’s getting something on his resume in the food industry too. I think I will have to get more serious about a job too. I’ve been really miserable at night and need to get that under control. I plan to add items to both etsy and eBay for pocket money and I want to design some greeting cards. Things will hopefully get better sooner or later.

And I leave you with an interesting tree we found at the park in Delaware. This is the park you pay to get it…

Aug14

May be hanging up the bushwacking stick

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We still want to  go geocaching, but if all goes well with Brian’s job interview later, we will only do it a few times a month. Not to say that I can’t go and find some in towns by myself. But after coming up empty handed a few times in parks, we are thinking that we don’t want to slide down a hill or break anything in parks that aren’t well maintained. Yesterday wasn’t really fun like the search should be. We went to my hometown and for some reason I thought finding a few caches there would be a piece of cake. Boy were we wrong! Glen Providence Park was designated a park back in 1936.

When I was a kid, they use to set off fireworks there and we all sat on the hill and watched. So we walked down that hill which looked a lot smaller to me now (that seems to be the case when we grow up) and headed for this one cache. We had parked at the main entrance as we started looking for a multi-cache and here the coords listed were for the parking! Duh! Not an Einstein day for either of us. To get to ‘real’ coords, you had to figure them out in this puzzle, but it really wasn’t  a puzzle, but a list of things about Denmark. Didn’t get that and didn’t have the time to figure it out.

So we trudged on down the firework hill (thinking in the back of our minds about climbing up it again) and saw this neat sight of Scroggie Pond. It was all green as if paint had been spilled on it and it lay on top of the water.

We only got within  130-150  feet of the two caches we were looking for and the GPS either stopped or jumped to a lower or higher number. We ventured up hill sides and came up empty handed. When and if we go to smallish park, we will now note if a trail is named and when the CO placed the cache. The one was placed in December. Although many people found the 1st one, they were looking in the colder months of the year.

The second cache was even harder. Seems after reading post logs, that we should have parked on the other side of the park where my school bus would let people off. Thinking back, I don’t know why they would get off there as they had big hills to climb…oh yeah, they were teenagers!

The trail was full of roots and rocks. I thought we could cross a stream, but my sneaker sunk into the muck.  Later I have to hose my sneaks down.

After all this, I went and got my hair done. We were sweaty messes, especially Brian. I had just given him a haircut this morning and his entire head was soaked.

Even though we had to pay to get in the Lums Pond Park last week, it was worth it-named trails, clean…we had fun there.

I am definitely the queen of lamp skirts and can zone in on one in less than 5 minutes most of the time. We found two of those on the way home! Got all the caches for the hometown mall now.

Delaware Geocaching Trail has the larger caches I enjoy, so I will stick with what they have placed.

I got permission to place a cache up in Kennett Square near the borough building. I missed the email before the lady there went on vacation and now have to wait until the end of the month to place it.

We got to meet Maggie at my brother’s house. She’s 5 months old and learning not to jump on people though she licked the Off! off my leg. Ugh.

Wednesday-Grim Ghost Tour in Philly!

Aug12

Witness Movie setting in scenic Lancaster County

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Brian and I went out early this afternoon to do some caching in Lancaster county. We stopped at the little town of Atglen, PA as there were a few on the way to the one I was truly wanting to find.  So we stop at this World II Memorial. It was on this narrow strip of land with a flag pole at one end and the memorial and benches and trees. We almost gave up until I saw the hint that said ‘at eye level’. You are so going to crack up. Brian saw a bird’s nest in one of the little trees and I told him it could be a fake one with a cache inside. He gingerly parted the branches only to see a little beak pop up from the nest-yes it was the real deal! Ha! Finally we were standing  next to an outlet box and I touched this thing that looked like a metal cover (light switch cover size) and it moved! I pulled on it and it was indeed the cache! Surprise! The first one it’s kind for us.

We went down the road a bit and found one in a parking lot. Bri lifted this lamp skirt twice-I got out and lifted it and saw a animal skin camouflaged container-bingo! He didn’t look hard enough.

Then the frustration began. I printed out the directions to the movie cache for ‘Witness’ and we didn’t get the signal for it until we stopped in a town and waited for it to load. Both the phone and GPS were wonky. The cache was down this road next to these ‘ladies’ cooling themselves off:

We saw lots and lots of the rolling hills of corn and other crops for miles and miles

See the hot air balloon in the middle. Took this out of the car window.

So we found the cache in a guard rail across from the cows. Brian had climbed over the guardrail and all of the sudden he started going ‘ouch!’, ‘that hurts!’  I thought he stepped on a wasp nest, when in fact it was the plant stinging nettle. A lady and her hubby came along  to fish on the little bridge and she I.D.ed the plant. She asked what we were looking for and we told her. Think she was mildly interested. We asked the guy about the Witness farm and it was down the road going the other way. I remembered to look on the GPS as the cache owner mentioned the address and after a little driving, we found it. A man was  plowing along the corn and Brian said he wanted me to see the farm (being the big Harrison Ford fan). I took this out of the windshield:

Can you picture Danny Glover walking down here when they figured out where John Book (Ford) was hiding out? I read that Sylvester Stallone was offered this role and he turned it down, regretting it.

The Amish guy actually waved to us as we left.

This was actually as we turned in the road to the house.

We then went to a nearby town where Brian worked for a few years and got club sandwiches for either a late lunch or early dinner (4 o’clock).

We went down the road and snagged a large (but wet cache) in someone’s yard and tried to find a well hidden one in a park-nada.

We saw where the Robert Fulton House (who invented the Steamboat) was about 6 miles away, so we went there. It was closed (we peeked in the windows) and walked around their garden. Thank goodness there was a bathroom in the middle of no where! That came in handy.

Where is that blasted cache?

I really wanted to go back to Strasburg, so we did and got some ice cream. One minute is was sunny and 10 minutes later the heaven’s opened up.

Girls in the ice cream shop

We had to wait a bit. A cache was down the road, but after looking around just a bit, I couldn’t find it. I’ll have to go back because I was the only one who couldn’t find it.

Sky over a Dutch market where we stopped for some things

We drove home in pouring rain, yet when we got home it wasn’t really doing anything.

Wednesday is our trip to Philadelphia for the ghost tour. We want to go in early to avoid work traffic and maybe cache a bit! Historic caching. : )

Aug10

Seeing The First Lady of the USA!

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What an exciting day we had up in Montgomery County, PA yesterday! I got an email, said to pick up the tickets and come on up to see First Lady Michelle Obama. Brian literally held the camera over the heads of other people (zoom lens). We arrived late, got our purses searched and walked through a metal detector. We had to stand almost an hour to wait for Mrs. Obama. The school (Upper Dublin high school, about an hour from here) only had the one side of bleachers open. Thank goodness my mom had a fold up chair, but that little lady had to walk from a field.

Not too bad right? We only got a few clear ones. We took my almost 82 yr old mom along as none of us has ever seen a First Lady before…just their inaugural gowns in the American History museum. Sean has seen both Barack Obama at a Penn State rally and Bill Clinton.

The First Lady is a very thoughtful, intelligent speaker. People tend to forget that both she and her husband come from humble backgrounds. Barack was raised by a single mother and his grandparents (I was raised by my mom and grandmom). I know she probably repeats this speech a lot, but it was interesting to the 1,800 people there.  We all had to go pick up the tickets to be able to go in.

The school band

The people on the bleachers

Send some good vibes as the hubby got a phone call yesterday while we were out for a job interview!

Aug7

Delaware Triple Play

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We are trying to take a little trip a week until the job gods send Brian something. It sure helps us to have something to think about. In ‘the old days’ you ‘most likely’ at least would get a phone call or letter in the mail if they were/weren’t interested in you. Nowadays, if you get an email you are lucky. When I got the store job, I went in and got an application and filled it out, ‘the old-fashioned way’.

Anyway, I thought it would be a great day to go to a pretty park for a picnic. We had been to Lum’s Pond Park many years ago for a company picnic where Brian worked when we first got married. We were trying to remember which area we were in back then and think it was near the entrance.

So we stopped for gas and shorties (hoagies/subs) and headed about 25 miles to the park. We had a few people around, but mostly had the place to ourselves. We sat near the pond and saw so many white herons:

I found this ‘yucky’ cache-it has been there 10 years (Something is eating the tree and it was all over the cache). The lid is broken where the pin goes in and there wasn’t anything good in it…I left some good stuff. We had found one other one (Brian spotted it first) called ‘Wham-o’ as it was near a field where you could use a Frisbee with your pooch.

Like my pigtails-need to keep my neck cool-lol. I thought I looked like ‘Hot Lips’ from M*A*S*H, my favorite show in the 1970s. I appreciated dry humor. : )

So after I got home I noticed that another part of the park had quite a few caches…live and learn. This park will be gorgeous in the fall…we will be back!

After we left here I wanted to do a few along the C&D canal…there’s a ton of them!

I did find 12! I don’t like ‘robot’ caching-they were behind a telephone pole every 500 feet. Helped me to get to 75!

First of 12!

So a guy passed us (it was hard to do on this narrow gravel road) and he looked disgruntled about something. I think he had been in and out of his van 54 times to get these. And he complained about it on geocaching.com. Because of him I wrote it was the 8th instead of the 7th. Why do these and complain?

So next we headed to Delaware City just to check it out a bit. It’s nice there if you can ignore the smoke stacks right before you hit the town. It was a little Victorian style water port at one time. Some of the homes are sweet. Need to go back to check them out closer.

We did see this:

And Fort Delaware…like to go over there sometime as I heard there is a cache there too!

Must take a ferry there

We ate at a place called ‘Crabby Dick’s’. Can’t beat $6.99 Shrimp Poboys and fries. It was one the first floor here. That’s our trusty white Mariner parked there.

And a few parting shots of yours truly and the hubs

And a glorious sunset

Taken from the car

Aug4

New Castle and Battery Park

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Brian and I headed down to New Castle again today as I wanted to find the cache in the New Castle historic Court House in Delaware.

The guide led us up to few short flights of stairs and said ‘it’s in here someplace.’ I saw it in like 20 seconds. It stood out like a sore thumb. LOL

So after we grabbed a Cajun lunch (wow that was spicy and I couldn’t eat it all) we headed down to nearby Battery Park right on the Delaware River.

By the way, I took all these from my phone. I do that and wear down my battery. We need to remember the Canon more!

Mine was Cajun Chicken salad with honey mustard…all I could taste was that Cajun spice. To me a little goes a long way. I wish I had gotten the Catfish Poboy like Brian.

Battery Park

There was a little beach here

Neat looking driftwood

A hubby enjoying the view

And finding a Nano! It had been here 7 years…

Brian retrieved this and we sat down at this picnic table. I opened it and the log fell out! It was so windy and we thought it blew across an open field. A man was sitting near by and asked what we were looking for and we told him about geocaching. Didn’t he get up and start looking around. We almost gave up and started walking away. He waved us back and said it had just fallen in the space on top of the picnic table-wow-that was luck. I signed it and off we went. He said he would check it out. We noticed he sat for a long time on top of a picnic table when we had walked to near the other end of the park.

Saw a pretty Bed and Breakfast and their garden

And me near the water with a big barg of old cars  behind me (so our log finding helper told us).

We went to a shopping center and looked around a QVC outlet store right before they closed. I got some crocheted Halloween ornaments for mom and me for $3.25 each. The box said they sold on air for $38.00. They had a lot of them-ghost, purple spider, etc.

We also stopped at Wendy’s and tried to find a few more caches to no avail. People were mentioning wasps for the one and we looked in two areas where they could build their nests-nope. The other cache was behind a liquor store. Near the cache area, there was a pile of sand, traffic cones, etc. We thought it was near a fence, but we didn’t see anything. Oh well, it was fine finding a nano.

*****

Today would have been Brian’s mom’s 90th birthday. She’s been gone almost 16 yrs now.

Aug2

Sprucing up the place

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I noticed some of my now old blog header wasn’t showing up, so I decided a new look was in order. I haven’t moved all the widgets in place yet, but I liked the cleaned up look and wild design at the top. The one I really liked was about $60, no thank you! Update-for Zoey, this was a free design.

Not too much happening. I went to see my mom and we went out a bit on Wednesday. Today we went to a new grocery store (actually we have the same one right up the road and this is about 4 miles away). Brian was applying for a job there and Sean filled out the application there yesterday.

I did grab a few outdoor ‘close-ups’. I can’t show you the gardens until I pull out some weeds. I can’t do that in this weather.

Brian was watering a window box and found this little one:

There’s like a little bird’s nest ‘hut’ in there and I saw two of these-nut hatches maybe? They got a little wet.

I have to make something out of these…thinking Chili and salsa:

These petunias are gorgeous on my back patio-they smell nice too. All for $1.00.

Zoey was right, the Persian Shield came back. Sorry for the blurry shot, it was starting to get dark.

I can’t wait to see the white Moonflowers, but I am enjoying the heart-shaped leaves!

Jul31

Not finding caches but spotting Charlie

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This was indeed a weird day of caching for us. We headed out about 2:15 or so and decided to stop off at an unplanned cache retrieval. I don’t like to do that as I then miss hints. Poor Bri is driving back and worth across a busy road. Finally I see the description where it said ‘permission by chiropractor’-so I then went around the back, spread some branches and it was in the nook of a tree. Whew!

Then our trip kind of went downhill. We did find the Stroud Preserve

and it was pretty, but a bit on the warm side and in the middle of nowhere. I think it was 1/2 mile hike in-all flat,but in the sun.  It did get a bit steep in one spot. We saw this:

Well we were so close, but no cigar. We went near a  tiny deck and there was mucky water to cross-but no thanks. We didn’t know where to go then. We saw a strange box which Brian checked out and he said it was an open container. We were looking for a ammo…

Near the parking lot…I was so ready to get in the a/c

So after that we headed down a few roads and ended up in another wooded area near where my cousins lived at one time. We got out and it was at 125m. We walked to about 30m and again didn’t see the ammo box. The GPS was so jumpy.  We spent a great deal of time at both areas and walked about 1.5 miles today.

We went to a local shopping center to look for yet another cache-the CO is one of those kind will set up a decoy. We looked around a guardrail, which happened to also have bushes nearby and gave up.

There’s a nice pizza place in the shopping center called Brother’s. I was a bit bummed by then. I was happy to get the exercise, but it’s discouraging as I had some new swag to add the those big containers. : (

We got to near the door and a young fellow came out-and before he stepped off the sidewalk I said to him, ‘are you on that tv show?’ I mean he could have been anyone…and he said ‘yes’! I was a bit dumbfounded and said ‘oh so nice to see you’ or something like that and he said ‘thanks’. I’m talking about West Chester, PA native Charlie McDermott who is on the popular (and one of my mom’s favorite shows) ‘The Middle’.

Recognize Axil Heck?

Seeing him boosted my spirits, so thanks for wanting Brother’s pizza tonight, Charlie. : )

After dinner we stopped at a park near where Sean goes to grad school. We headed toward a gazebo and we never had luck with them. Then we looked under it where a stream was-nope. I suggested we look ‘on the other side’ and bingo, found it under a stump. Yes! I left some cute swag-an Olympic #1 winner medal and a bracelet.

I reallly wanted to grab a virtual in front of our county courthouse. We got out and parked, walked across the street and found the statue ‘Glory’ and also who sculpted it. I had to send that info to the CO.

I noticed there was an interesting one a few blocks away. It was near a train station. The cache was a huge metal box and from the photos, there were two caches inside. I was excited. We had to put a combo in the two locks-messed the one up (beginning of north for the one and ‘end’ of west for the other-we were also putting in the beginning of the west). People were saying it’s a bugger to get open. It was getting dark, so we’ll bring a screwdriver (!) next time. It hadn’t been open since the end of May. Can’t wait to go back, but I hope the CO looses the lid a bit.

That was our adventure for the day. Hope to go to my mom’s one of these days. : )