Lantern Festival
Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain
July 17, 2008

More photos in my Flickr set.

I was at the Brigham for an appointment on Tuesday and stepped outside to take a call.

I wonder if the guy who came up with the original Dancing Baby gif from way back in the olden internet days ever stood outside of 221 Longwood Ave.

My brother sent this to my cell phone last night. Of course I didn’t get it until this morning because my cell phone was out of juice and the charger was at the office.

He stayed until the bitter end and didn’t get home until 4am.

I’m looking forward to hearing all about it when I am in NJ again in a few weeks.

I did. 

Thankfully, someone on my lawyer board posted this -

I finally had a free weekend to get Java to the groomer.

I think he misunderstood me when I said “NOT like the infamous kitty lion cut”.

She looks so funny.

 

Before picture (taken 3 weeks ago):

 

Great-grandfather McNulty’s House
(no longer in the family)
Carbondale, PA
July 7, 2008

This building in Vandling, PA, was my great-grandfather’s general store, post office, and beer business back in the early 1900’s. Back then it didnt have ugly, beige vinyl siding or a really bad ‘porch’. Back then it was a white, three story, clapboard structure, with porches on each floor. Next time I’m home I’ll have to remember to take a photo of the painting we have of it.

My grandfather and his 9 siblings were born here. A great uncle fell from the third story porch and died here. My Dad would spend his summers here working on the beer trucks.

The K’s moved to this corner of northeastern Pennsylvania in the mid 1700’s.  Before that they were in Connecticut (Tolland, Mystic, etc.) going back to the late 1600’s.  Quite a contrast to the maternal side of the family who only arrived here in the late 1800’s.

This is how much sock knitting one can accomplish between suburban NJ and Scranton, PA. I really wish Java had opposable thumbs and a drivers license. If she did, I’d be such a productive knitter. I did all of the driving after we left Scranton on the family history tour and then back to NJ.

We can trace my Dad’s family back to the Mayflower. Most of their time was spent in the Carbondale/Vandling area of Pennsylvania. They went there in the mid 1700’s and didn’t leave until the early 1900’s. My grandfather was the first to go to college (then Med School) and make a life outside of the area.

This was the first time we’ve been back in 30 years. My Dad and I are already planing another trip. It’s gorgeous country.

Yarn: Regia 4 fadig Color (#1937)
Needles: Susan Bates #1 Circs - Magic Loop (hate the join on these)
Pattern: My Own (details will be in Ravelry when I get around to writing them down)

Judy tagged all the book lovers, so here goes:

That Book Meme
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

 

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (a good portion of it anyway)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell  (I tried.  It’s just not for me.)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy  (I tried.  It’s just not for me.)
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky  (I tried.  It’s just not for me.)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Although I would not put this on a ‘Top 100 Book’ list.)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving  (LOVED THIS BOOK)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle  (All the Conan Doyle Sherlock books.)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo  (I tried.  It’s just not for me.)

 

Tin Roof.
Rusted.
Gruene, TX
June 21, 2008