Ten Most Influential Books in my Life

I don't remember what inspired me to make this list, but I think I'll preserve it and see if my opinion changes in a few years.

Ten most influential books:

1.       Happy Hollister series when I was very young. My sister, Carol, subscribed to the series for me, and it is one of my earliest memories of owning a book.

2.       Farmer Boy, in 3^rd grade, which was read aloud to the class every day after recess. It planted the seed of how important it is to read aloud to children, even after they are old enough to read to themselves. I have read this book and many others to both my children and grandchildren, all of whom I am proud to say are avid readers.

3.       Rufous the Red-tailed Hawk, by Helen Garrett. Another book that I believe I was introduced to by my 3^rd grade teacher, and which I later searched far and wide to find to buy for my own children. To this day, I can’t see a hawk without remembering that book.

4.       Bulfinch’s Mythology – I can’t tell you how old I was when I read this, elementary school, I think, but reading mythology (and the Bible) forms the basis for understanding all sort of literature as you get older.

5.       ELLSWORTH AND THE CATS FROM MARS, NOBODY, DON'T TOUCH MY ROOM, OH, BROTHER! by Patience Brewster – books I bought my children from an author/artist who visited our local library when they were small. I believe they all still have theirs, or if not, their sister is caretaking it.

6.       The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease. I owned and marked up a copy when my children were young, and we read many, many books from it.

7.       The Silent Knife by Estner and Cohen, my bible during my childbearing years

8.       Euell Gibbons, Stalking the …. books. They influenced my love of nature and self-suffiency.

9.       Christy by Catherine Marshall. I read this when it came out in 1968, and I have loved it ever since.  How fitting that we will move to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee in a few years.

10.   Alex Wade’s 30 Energy Efficient Homes You Can Build, and someday I hope we will.

11.   Bernard Clayton’s Complete Book of Breads, given to me by my best friend, Vicky, in the late 1970s, and still in use in my kitchen today. 

Spring 2014 recap

Where to start? Well, right now I'm sitting in a rental cabin near Pigeon Forge, TN. It's early morning (3AM) and John is still asleep, so I came out to the LR so I wouldn't wake him. It has been a busy and stressful spring, and I've been saying I needed a vacation forever, so here we are - planned on the spur of the moment.
The year so far:
The conference I was awarded the Conversations in the Disciplines grant last spring is now behind me, after months of planning and much stress. It went very well. The subject was Promoting Scholarly Communication through Open Access Journals. We had about 75 people from all over, and Marilyn Billings from UMass, Amherst was our keynote. What a fabulous job she did. Then, 2 weeks ago was the Graduate Research Conference, and I spent the week before helping Adrian scramble to get everything done, working until 10PM one night, and 7PM another.
But the toughest part of the year happened on April 16th. John's sister, Jean, suffered an aortic dissection, something people usually die immediately from. She initially went to Medina, where they were unable to tell what was wrong with her, since she was unresponsive. They made the wise decision to send her to Strong, where she underwent surgery to put a graft in place. It was touch and go, and the doctors told us we had to decide whether to even do the surgery, knowing that she might well die on the table or if be a vegetable who was paralyzed from the waist down and on dialysis for the rest of her life. Fortunately, they were able to bring her out of the sedation enough to determine she hadn't suffered any injury to her brain due to lack of oxygen, and so the surgery was a go. The surgery was a success, her kidneys started functioning again, and now she is in the cardiac ICU at Strong recovering. Three weeks later they are beginning to wean her off the ventilator, and once that happens she should be moved to a regular room on the cardiac floor to begin her long program of rehabilitation. She shows a small amount of movement in one leg, that seems to be the biggest unknown at this point.
So what are we doing in TN? Looking for land to buy to build our retirement home. And that is another story for another time.

2 AM December 17th

Sleep eludes me tonight, so I thought I would update the blog for a change. My birthday was on Saturday, and although we had plans to go away (which we haven't done in 6 years now), the weather was bad and we decided against it. Linda canceled her party on Friday night, and it was just too snowy and frigid on Saturday night to make the trip to West Seneca for the Geocaching Holiday Party. So we stayed home. Aeddon spent the night Friday, after John picked him up from the Senior Council trip to see the Grinch at 11:30, and Adrienne came over on Saturday morning to take me to breakfast for my birthday. I suggested we eat in, so we did and the 4 of us played cards afterwards. Then later in the afternoon, Brandon came over and the 3 of us played Cutthroat - I won - imagine that! Finally, in the evening, we decided to go to Lynn and Gail's to play cards yet again.

California Part 2

The Fairfield-Berkeley transition went quite smoothly. After breakfast, we packed the car, looked for a few local caches with no luck, and headed south. We did a tour of the Jelly Belly factory - which was quite fun, and picked up a few souvenirs for the kids. (Actually that might have been Monday). We headed into Berkeley to find our new hotel, drop our luggage off, and look for a few caches in the Midpenisula Open Space area. I got a cache that I needed for the Cachiversary challenge (placed on the day I started geocaching, 6/8/2013), so that was cool. In NY, while geocaching, I mostly have to worry about whether it's hunting season or not. Here, it's rattlesnakes, poison oak and mountain lions. Mountain lions?!

We ended up doing our most challenging hike, being a 3 terrain that was about a mile total length. The challenge was in how steep the trail was. All downhill to the cache, all uphill to the car. Hard work, but I'm proud to say, John handled it like a walk to the corner store, even though it was much harder for me.

When we finally decided about 2PM to head to SFO I was pleasantly surprised at how easy that trip was. No major traffic jams. Got the car returned with no major incidents (a minor one, I discovered on the AirTrain out of the garage that I had left my new hat in the car and we had to go back - wasted about 45 minutes that we could have been investigating SF - or not). Got our BART tickets, and with the help of a very nice lady found our way to Downtown Berkeley. More later.

California (Sat-Mon)

John and I are out in California for a combination vacation/business trip. We left Saturday, 10/5, and will be here until next Saturday. Reluctant fliers, we were pretty low key in the weeks leading up to the trip, but surprisingly packed early and ready to go. Saturday morning I decided to go for an "emergency" manicure and in honor of the trip picked "Lost on Lombard" from the O.P.I. San Francisco collection. It's a deep burgundy, a color family (red/pink) that I never wear. Nice, though.

The flight from BUF to ORD was in a small plane. I had diarrhea the whole trip. But by the time we boarded the plane in Chicago, my stomach had settled down and this flight went off without remark. It was a bigger plane, 6 seats across instead of 4, and it turned out that the 3rd seat in our row was empty, so we had some extra space. We got into SFO about 5:30, and by the time we retrieved our luggage, got a rental car (that was a mess) and got to our hotel, an hour north of San Francisco it was 8:00 (think 11PM, EST) and we still hadn't eaten anything. We drove through the nearby Wendy's and I wolfed down a small sandwich and prepared for a night of heartburn. But, to my surprise, it never happened.

On Sunday, we decided to drop off as many of the travel bugs we brought, as possible. I did a route query from Fairfield to Reno NV, and we were off. As we approached the NV area, we decided to forgo the quicky divorce and see Lake Tahoe, instead. We came upon a young couple there taking pictures of each other, and offered to take their picture together. In return they took one of us:

After a short hike, we went into Tahoe for an ice cream cone and something to drink, and watched a little of the Bronco/Cowboys game that was on in the burger place. There were two other couples there, both Broncos fans, so it was a fun time. When we finally got back to the hotel, it was once again late (8:30 EST), but we walked over to Straw Hat Pizza and had dinner - again without incident!

Monday we went to the coast. It didn't work out as well, since with the government shutdown, we couldn't access the public beach to go dip my toes in the ocean. And then we drove on Highway 1, which is long, winding, and on the side of a cliff. Not my idea of a good time. Regardless, sharing the day with John made it worthwhile. We were back to the hotel a little earlier, and took a 2 mile walk around Fairfield, picking up some local caches and eating once again at the Pizza Place.

Today we check out, drop off our luggage at the Berkeley City Club, our car at the airport and figure out how we get back to Berkeley (on BART, I believe).

Staycation, part 2

Thursday arrived far too fast. We started painting - natural straw over steel blue, and then made a quick trip to Brockport to try and be a FTF on a cache at the Seymour Library. No luck, and as it turned out, once again the posted coordinates were way off. While we were there, we checked in the Sherwood Williams Paint store for a border and ended up checking out a book to look further. No luck either there or online, though. For dinner, we ended up going to the Black North Inn, up at Point Breeze (good food!), and then over to Golden Hill State Park where we picked up one more cache - and starting looking for 2 more until we realized that it was too far through the woods to make it back in before dusk, and turned around halfway.


Friday we decided to check locally for a border, and as we were walking out of Cases, we came across 4 packages in the discount bin ($.99 each). They couldn't have been more perfect, if we had sought them out! So we went back to Brockport to return the book, and while we were there, we worked on the Oldies by Goodies challenge, which involved finding the 10 oldest caches in our area. 3 were in Northhampton Park, so we spent a few hours hiking there. Found 2/3, along with several others in the park, but by the time we finished (the day was in the 80s), I had gotten dehydrated and was in a lot of pain (hip), so when we got out of the woods, I just crashed at a picnic table and John was a sweetie and walked the last .25 mile and brought back the car and picked me up. At that point, I didn't care if I ever went geocaching again!

By Saturday, we had finished up the painting (ceiling and walls), and Gail came over to help me hang border. Here is the end result, which I am very happy with:

We rested, picked up the last items we needed in Lockport, along with 2 quick caches and that was our day.

Sunday - last day of staycation - we went to the RocGeo picnic in Durand Eastman Park. John had smoked a pork shoulder the day before, so we brought pulled pork and slider buns. Won a raffle prize of Tilley Hat puzzle solutions, and did a bunch of caches on the way home.

All in all it wasn't a bad staycation at all. Accomplished a major project at home, and did a lot of geocaching!

Staycation

On 8/17, I realized that summer was almost over and I hadn't taken a vacation. And, it turned out that my boss told me I was entitled to 5 days of comp time for my recent trip to Illinois, so I promptly took the next week off. This is what we did:
On Saturday, we went down to Allegany State Park to see Adrienne and family, and geocached the Amish Geotrail on the way down. Went to 10 caches, ended up with 10 buttons and a geocoin. We ended up spending about 45 minutes in Allegany, but that was fine. No one seemed particularly interested in us being there.Biggest caching day ever (23 caches).

Sunday, we started removing wallpaper from the kitchen, so the pink fruit and flowers are no more. We discovered the 24 caches we thought we had done yesterday were actually only 23, with one duplicate, so we got up early enough to get one before the 24 hour time frame was up (I have to get John a geocoin for 24 in 24 now). Other than that, we went over to Batavia, picked up a few there, had dinner at Applebee's and bought paint supplies.
Monday meant washing walls and finishing stripping wallpaper, and in the afternoon we went to look at some cabinets over in Spencerport. Natural oak, 16 cabinets for $1975. We passed on this deal, but left our name and number with the owner (Larry Almeter), who is a carpenter who redoes kitchens and resells the cabinets he removes at a good price. We only found one cache this day, since the just published cache that was nearby turned out not to be nearby (coordinates were wrong). We took the boys with us to Spencerport (A1 and A2), and stopped at a cemetery. Alden kept acting nutso, climbing trees, etc., and John was being grumpy and send "enough", so that was the end of that.
Tuesday, we started priming the kitchen and the boys came over and worked outside removing brush from behind the house, and spent the night after another quick trip to Batavia (where we found an alien cache), so they could get an early start the next morning.
Wednesday we all went to Byron to do a few caches down the old Westshore Railroad bed, and by the Chapel Rd. fishing hole.

Alden got to climb trees this time with impunity, and acquired the geotag of TreeBoy. Aeddon became Cryptomancer. A good time was had by all.