Category Archives: Brian

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. : )

Jul29

Awesome vintage finds

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I took some photos of my new stash from Friday. I am tickled with the framed photo trio and the big bag of vintage greeting cards! Good finds. I haven’t been feeling that great from being overly warm at night and I have been dragging during the day, so I enjoyed looking at these yesterday.

Here is sweet Irene:

I asked the Facebook gang if I should replace the mat as it’s just an ugly yellowed piece of paper. To have such a sweet photo shoot, the previous owner sure didn’t do this trio justice. Most said to replace it with a gray tone mat to go with the flow of the photos better. One artist said that your eye goes right to ugly yellowing paper. One said it gives it character. I may hold some of my pretty scrapbook papers to see. What do you think?

Then I found these interesting portraits, many from Lancaster, PA.

One had this stamp on the back-an old Ben Franklin. It’s damaged by maybe worth at least $5-more that a cent as it originally cost.

1930s McCall’s paper dolls (both sides of sleeve)

She’s so sweet

I found this little frog with the waterlily hat. He’s only about 2 inches high.

I’m still going through the bag of cards. Here’s a few I like so far:

and the inside….that name tickled me

And this one wasn’t even used:

Today I needed a change of scenery and we went to the Delaware Farmer’s market again. I was not thrilled with the produce today. Of course Friday produce will be better. I did go in a little ‘antique’ stall (mostly books and records-lps) but I had seen a little bisque bust similar to one my pal Carole has, but smaller. Last week it was marked $20, but they were going to lower it 5. This time around when I said could you do better the man said $12. I found her on eBay and she’s a Limoge look-alike and had a boy partner. She was about $35 on the site!

I told Brian we should have a stall like this and he went humph. : )

Geocaching on a whim and when you are tired don’t go hand in hand most times. We ‘almost’ looked for 4 today and only found 1. The one we found was at a train depot-one where you see scenic Delaware. Easy as pie. There was one in Pep Boys we couldn’t find as the GPS was bouncing between a guardrail and near the road-a busy road. One was a park and we didn’t feel like walking trails at 5:30 at night. We’ll have to go for a picnic sometime. The last one should have been easy, but my GPS went out and it involved some bushwacking. We went in the woods a bit, saw where someone had made a fire in there-close to a baseball field and the Police athletic building. No dice.

I thought this was interesting. At the place where I bought the bust, they had a 1939 NY World Fair book. The cover was almost off, but it had some great photos. They wanted $20 and I thought that was steep. When we got home, I asked my mom if someone in the family had been to that fair and she said she had! Will have to try and get the book cheaper for her next time.

Jul28

Looking for abandoned relatives and caches

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Friday seems to be our day to go out shopping and caching. A antique mall down in Newark, DE had a sale going on and since I haven’t been there for a few months, we headed on down. It’s near where we bought our Mariner and we kind of forgot where to go. Anyway, found some great old photos and a big bag of vintage greeting cards and some little figurines. I got between 20-40% off. My ‘prize’ was a trio of photos of a little girl (back in 1921) named Irene posing. She may be someone’s abandoned relative, but at least she has a name. I’ll share photos soon. I may redo the frame and matting and I will hang it up.

As for cache hunting…we (well me, but Bri too) wanted to find #50…and we did! It was a funny looking vial, I don’t even know what it’s for and don’t want to know.

The next one was near a mural in the town. I think it was on some traffic signal sign right where people were zooming by…passed that one, but the mural was cute. Didn’t take a photo, but will if I look again sometime. This was a noisy, going in circles kind of area. And it was hot, so not fun as it could be. I do like the town as it has some cute shops…will come back when it’s cooler.

I happen to see there was one right near a fountain at the University of Delaware, a very nice campus. We looked in the blazing sun again for a nano-those tiny ones, no luck.

Found the below in a cemetery. We were all sweaty after 10 minutes!

Bri’s getting good at spotting these little containers. Glad it was blue!

We did drive-thrus in few shopping centers on the way home. The one may have been in bushes, but again I looked, but didn’t dig deeper as there was a ton of traffic in that area. I lost the GPS at the other shopping center. These are some in shopping areas we go to once in a while. so we will look again. I am liking the big ammo boxes and down in Delaware we can find quite a few along the Delaware Geocaching Trail.

We stopped for a yummy cheese steak sandwich in a shop that was too warm. A few doors down was a cupcake place…yeah, I splurged ($2.25 each). I got one with Carole/Pea in mind as she’s at a tribute event for Elvis this weekend. I tried half-it’s a banana cupcake with peanut butter frosting and bacon. I thought it needed more of a contrast between sweet and savory. The other I bought was a Key lime with coconut cake-nice.

We watched the Olympics-nice opening across the pond in Great Britain. Some of those countries need to rethink how they dress their athletics. Many were comical to say the least.

We are planning a few activities-a ghost tour in Philly-but Brian and me. We are going the 15th of August, so pray it’s cooled off by 7 pm. They last about 1.5 hours.  This is a Livingsocial deal.

And we are thinking about the Beatlemania event that is held over Labor Day weekend that we went to last year in Maryland. Just one night and there are a few ticket deals online. We had fun last year and Sean said he’d buy his own admission too. Got to get that booked.

A photo from last year…

Jul26

You find some- you don’t

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As I was saying in an earlier post, Brian and I were getting the micro  cache finds down to a science. We decided to go look for some larger caches yesterday down in Yorklyn, DE. I mainly use my phone. So it was after 3 when we went out as Brian had a phone interview and we start to drive down our road. I should have gotten the site loaded up first as it wouldn’t do so going down our road. We turned around until it picked up again, but this was just the beginning of our issue with it. I decided to try a cache that hasn’t been found for a while-like March of this year. When you read info on a few caches, you forget some of the hints, etc. We parked across from a lovely place we’ve never seen before-Marshall Steam Museum & Friends of Auburn Heights Preserve Inc.. They run a miniature steam train here several times a year. That winds around this pond:

Several bullfrogs live here and croaked or jumped in when we approached. Up the hill is a gorgeous mansion with turrets.

We started looking for the cache across the road which lead into woods. That didn’t work so Bri suggested we look around the train museum property. The GPS never went under 106m. After I got home, I saw we were suppose to park around the corner from this cache where we ended up finding another one anyway. I guess I should take some notes. We went on a few wild goose chases -decided not to go through waist high grass at one place! We’ll go back in the fall.

We found this one and I gladly added more swag to the box. I am finding these caches need goodies! I found a few cute things at the Dollar Store and get a few things for Oriental Trading Co.

After about 45 minutes of looking for the first one, we gave up. If we had followed a dirt road behind the above cache, I think we would have hit on it! The GPS was really jumpy because of the trees, etc.

Today I went to my yearly eye doctor visit, though a few months late and with no insurance. I’ve been seeing a nice woman doctor a little younger than I am. So my prescription is the same after a few years and my internet purchased glasses are fine. She said my eyes are really dry and I have to use an antibiotic cream at night to see if that helps. I have to keep the pressure checked in my eyes for glaucoma, but I am good for a year. : )

I’m hoping to go to an antique mall tomorrow and look around for a few caches so I can get to #50. The mall is having a 20% off sale on some things and I usually look for old photos and paper items.  It’s something to do. : )

 

Jul25

Narrowing it down…

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So we are heading up to 50 cache finds soon! I’m thinking it would be nice to go look for a few larger ones so I can add some swag to them. Lately it’s been all micros. If you told me that a few months ago, I’d laugh. I surely could have found these with hints online, but it was indeed a learning process which, when the first one was found, it sure was a surprise and made us smile! In fact, my statistics show that we have mostly found micros. But these kind ‘get old’ and are called ‘micro spew’ as they are so common. Most are in shopping centers…there’s your hint!

I was sad to see this one open with it and with the log and things floating in water in the inside of a tree. This was an old cemetery down the road from my mom’s house.

This is considered a micro as it pill bottle size…but they can be smaller, a ‘nano’ and Brian has found two of those!

Brian and I took my mom to the eye doctor. She gets medication by injection in one or the other and yesterday it was her good eye. We dropped her off as it’s a 2+ hours appointment. That’s when we go look for caches, but I did look around the mall too.  After mom’s appointment, we took her to Texas Roadhouse as they have a nice ‘early bird’ special Mondays to Thursday. Their select menu is $7.99 and there is a 6 oz sirloin steak on that menu! That’s what we usually want anyway.

We take mom home (the restaurant is almost halfway to our home) and are almost to the same area when she phoned and said her purse with her medication was in the car-and indeed it was! So we had to turn around again…but looked for a few caches in a nearby shopping center first. The first was easy, but the second one called ‘Bah humbug’ as it was placed around Christmastime of last year was a ‘DNF’ (did not find) by many people. I looked at the hints and thought we’d give it a try. First you find a long metal fence and have to narrow down on that. We looked and looked-nothing. I did email the Cache owner for a hint and he said ‘fishing’-so I’m thinking the cache is hanging off a fishing line down the wall-the wall drops at least 100 feet behind the fence!  I saw a string with nothing on the end, so I’m thinking that was a decoy string-lol. We’ll have to check it out some other time.

Brian has a phone interview in a few hours. I haven’t heard back from the school. Sean signed up for a volunteer internship for a few weeks. Something for the resume and of course it’s a learning experience too!

Jul22

Fluttering around the yard

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Not only are these gorgeous yellow Swallowtails fluttering here and there, Brian and I were doing some much needed yard work over the weekend.

Saturday we were pulling weeds out of flowerbeds and Brian did the sidewalk. I thought it would be wise to get the weedwacker out on Sunday, so I fished around the shed and found it plus the extension cord. I started and Brian finished, though he ran out of cord. Big improvement!

It was one of the most pleasant days we had in a long time. I even got the iPad to work sitting outside so I watched an episode of  Web Therapy with Lisa Kudrow (remember Friends’ Phoebe?) She is really good with her prim and proper voice, but ‘her web practice’  looks like she has ulterior motive like maybe fooling around with her web patients!

With the events of Friday-the shootings in Aurora, CO…we’ve been walking around here with a sick feeling in our stomachs. An artist connection on Face Book said an old friend of hers lost her granddaughter Veronica, age 6. This is a nightmare. The public shouldn’t get their hands on assault weapons capable of firing round after round of bullets. Wasn’t it enough last year in Arizona to start regulating weapons like this? Sean was at a midnight screening of  Batman in Delaware, but who is to say why couldn’t that have happened in any theater?

 

Jul20

A little trip to New Castle, DE

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This was the perfect day for a little trip down to Delaware. After learning about the Colorado theater shooting, for some reason I needed to get out of the house instead of keeping myself cooped up. I had read about the Goodwill outlet store through a blog where the lady is into thrifting locally. She scores big on kids’ clothes and toys all the time. I look for old books, novels, name brand things and craft stuff. It’s an interesting place-rows and rows of big blue bins. I try to avoid clothing-you just don’t know how clean it is. If something catches my eye, then I will investigate more. I scored an American Urban Outfitters sweater, some Disney stuff, Wuthering Heights book from 1940 something, a galvonized bucket with a pumpkin face cut out, 2 plush Rudolph the Red-nosed reindeer,  a ‘singing’ Hallmark bear couple, a John Denver songbook and lots of novels. They change out the bins every so often and they did that while we were there. After they put the new bins out, people went nuts! A few people were scooping the books in their baskets like crazy. I think they did that so they could price them later with their cellphones?

After we left there, we went a few miles down to historic New Castle. It’s a smaller version of Old Philadelphia and Williamsburg and not at busy! I didn’t bring my bigger camera as it was rainy today. These are all phone captures.

The first place we stopped at was the George Read house. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence

Below is the front of the George Reed House dating from the 1700s

Cobblestone stones are still here on this strength of road called ‘The Strand’

A cute pooch was barking at us along the Strand.

So were down this road looking for a ‘virtual’ cache-a hole in the wall. The GPS lead us to this,

…but the Cache owner said it was a bigger hole and closer to the water. He let us post as a find anyway. We are going back to this area because of the following photo.

This is the ‘first’ part of the cache (that was the hint-to look in the window). We were looking in the rose bushes and around the mailbox. And the courthouse was closed too.

I poised with William ‘Billy’ Penn who founded this area first.

There were a few quaint shops and restaurants. We went into a New Orleans style one and both had Jambalaya-Brian with chicken and me with crayfish-really spicy! I brought half of mine home. We went into a gift shop and the lady said that they use to be in Ridley Park, nearer my mom. I happen to have eaten in that one many years ago with my mom and the ladies she worked with. Small world.

The lady in the gift shop told us how to get to the New Castle Farmer’s Market, just down the road. We found a produce place with a dozen lemons for $3 and 99 cent bundles of asparagus.

This area is under 20 miles away and we’ve never been to the historic area.

And we found 4 other caches on the way home. Brian starts to sigh, I knew he was tired. Found three lamp skirt ones and a rain gutter guard one-lol.

We stopped at Rita’s Water Ice and got swirl cones to cool the fire of the Cajun food. Yum.

Jul15

Caching in

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We are so zonked from last week, but on Saturday night, I asked if we could get to church a few minutes earlier as I wanted to place a cache near the parking lot area. It’s way in the front and they have twice the needed space for parking. I had a lamp post in mind, but it had a ton of overgrown bushes in front of it. I tried another post, but it was too much in the open. So I went back to the first one, walked around the corner and it wasn’t hard to reach in and put the key holder on the metal part. There is a wide open space there and what’s funny, the barracks for the township police are in sight. It shouldn’t take long to locate….I hope. I am waiting for it to be approved. I looked at the preview page and the map there has the church in the incorrect area. It’s located a little away from a main intersection-but not according to the map. I hope they just follow what I have as coordinates.

After church we went to the little park where my first cache is. I wanted to add a mini pencil, plastic bag for the log and pencil and a travel bug. A little down the road, a policeman was in his car shooting the breeze with a local. I don’t think he even saw me get out of the car, look and retrieve my cache and sit and put the stuff in it-lol.

I took a few shots of this sweet area-

We headed to Perkins as we all felt like having breakfast for dinner. I am still waiting to get a really good meal here. We don’t eat here often. Oh, before we went in, I thought it would be fun to hide a cache behind the place. It’s between a kid’s recreational place (kind of like a Chucky Cheese), so I went under some pines and hid it behind the furthest one. It shouldn’t be disturbed-I hope. That has a travel bug in it also.

So after dinner, I said-let’s go out to the next town and look for a cache. The guys both said yes, but I put the incorrect cache on the phone and we headed down a few back roads. Opps! Funny thing, we were driving down this road, and there was the former dental receptionist pulling a grandbaby down the road in a wagon! Wow, small world. And down another road, Brian had to swerve a fallen tree-just got the antenna with that one. The three of us got out and it didn’t take long to find it off the road. Sean wasn’t crazy about sticking his head in the brush. Brian and I said that was nothing! I am bringing my Oriental Trading stuff with me to restock these caches-most are so empty. For $15, I got big bags of plastic bracelets and coins.

That’s what I added underneath-even the pirate map!

It’s funny, you live in an area for over 25 yrs and you don’t see how pretty some of it is. Thanks to Geocaching we are seeing lots of ‘hidden’ beauty.

We then went down the road to a research area. It was called ‘Pony Express’ as some ponies are fenced nearby. They must have been in for the night. Sean and I got out and found it rather quickly under a tree. Again, I stocked it with some more swag.

I felt I was on a roll, so I went to the one near my house and gave it a good look-small area, but so many hiding places-trees, bushes, fence, guard rail. I just can’t see it! I emailed the CO for a hint-nothing. His was the first one we went to last night. Meanie-lol

More hot weather this week. I haven’t shown much of my gardens as there isn’t much to see except for dried up flowers and lots of weeds. The coleus do look pretty and I will photograph it.  I may go see if I can pull some out-but they were saying how thick the air is-think that was my problem at the park a few weeks ago.

Jul14

Lights and Music pt 2

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I got my mom on Wednesday and wanted to treat her to dinner at Texas Roadhouse. I’ve been to the one in Lancaster and found some of the sides a bit salty. This one is halfway between mom and me, so we stopped. Lucky for us we got  the ‘early bird’ special for $7.99 each. We got a 6 oz piece of sirloin, two sides and roll for that. We also got onions and mushrooms-$2 more (each). Very good steak. We like deals like that. I think it’s Monday-Wednesday, but double check. And were the sides salty-the green beans had ham in them and they certainly were.

Yesterday I took mom down to the Habitat resale store and she enjoyed looking at the books for 10 cents each or 10 for $1.00. I only bought 3 books, a stainless steel serving bowl and a Birthday bear. I will buy a bear once in a while if it’s really cute-and it was $1.

We went over to Longwood Gardens around 6:15 or so and Brian came too. We got mom a chair and we headed over to the little cafe. She couldn’t decide what she wanted. I knew I wanted the cream of mushroom soup and I got some cold lo mein which I didn’t care for.  Bri got half a large ham and cheese and mom finally got mac and cheese and a hot dog (from the kid’s menu). I didn’t know she had eaten a Hershey bar until I found the paper left on the sofa! She had eaten it beforehand and I think it killed her already weak appetite.  We all nibbled a chocolate pecan tart.

We then went over to the main Conservatory and saw this:

Well that’s the lovely Conservatory

Part of the Bruce Monro light show exhibit…I’ll have to come back to see the Conservatory when it’s darker outside

They like Proven Winners plants here-that’s a big thumbs up!

The lake lights were starting to look pretty-we saw them a few days ago when it was pitch dark, so neat.

The Italian Water Gardens looked neat at night-sat this on a wall.

They also had CDs made in water lily shapes

I sat this on the side of a life preserver case as the shutter was getting so slow

It was a hike to ‘The Meadows’ to see this display:

These are plastic water bottles!

The last part was really hard to photograph without a tripod-it was the woods to a tree house dotted with lights similar to the lake lights. Someone said it looked like ‘The Wizard of Oz’

I think my mom enjoyed being pushed around! It was about a 2 mile walk.

Brian and I took mom home and we headed to a few geocaches on the 13th. This was after hitting Chick-fil-a. We didn’t know it was free sandwich day if you wore a cow costume! So… I knew where one was as a fellow cacher told me. We got to it and it was basically out in the open. The other one, which we tried to find a few months ago was right were I thought it was. We then went to a ‘new’ one and that was so neat! We were near trash bins-ugh!! A cache would never be on one of them. There was a fence there and I leaned over and saw a wooden thing in the extreme corner. I touched it and it moved-it was so cool-

I was so pleased with myself!

We skipped dinner and headed to the Maria Muldaur concert up in Kennett Square. She is a spunky, sassy and bluesy 68 yr old now. I don’t think she enjoys singing ‘Midnight at the Oasis’ that much, though I think it was her biggest hit. Afterwards she went to a counter to sign her CDs and didn’t act too thrilled with having to do so. I have seen a few other artists smile and thank people-not her. I didn’t buy one. We went for some pizza and had the place to ourselves.

We had a busy week! More heat expected too. My flowers are just shriveling up. : (

Jul11

Magical night of music and lights

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Our concert ‘finally’ came up. Don’t think we weren’t worried about it being a warm night, but it turned out fairly nice with lower humidity. Wow, it was pretty cool to see an actual movie star like Kevin Bacon, and he’s quite a musician. He came out playing the bongos, but switched to guitar and also harmonica. His brother Michael (age 63) not only plays the guitar, but he played the Cello in a few songs-what a treat.

Sean’s Instagram-really good! We were about 9 rows back, but you can see the view I had of the hugging couple. I also had a 40-something Madonna like lady who couldn’t sit still and had gotten up right at this moment.

The show was about 75 minutes (one encore-Bob Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Released’).

This was a song about being a mummer’s son-called New Year’s Day. It’s a Philly thing, but what happens is the mummer’s who are in the New Year’s Day Parade, go around and recite the part of this song…

After the show was over, we went to the left through the gardens instead of to the right near where the exit was. Well little did I know, we were ‘allowed’ to go see the Bruce Munro light display down by the lake! It was so magical and like a fairyland. I am taking my mom to see the rest of it on Thursday night.

This was one of the teaser displays out front.

We got some ice cream on the way home, so it was a nice evening for the three of us!