Fall leaves and Happy Halloween

The leaves are almost all gone now, but I wanted to share two photos. One is my back yard seen through the branches of the maple tree. The other is a calling card that autumn left at my back door. Seriously, we came home and there was this one red leaf stuck in the door jamb. It stayed there for days. Looked very cool.

I played my violin today at a big church meeting. Something I really never like doing. But I got to conduct the stake women's choir on two numbers. It was totally awesome. I love conducting and these ladies were good. Wonderful experience.

The weather is yucky tonight so I'm not sure whether or not I'll have trick or treaters, especially with the flu going around. But I'm ready for them if they come. Sweetarts, Now and Laters and Sugar Daddy pops. It was just too cruel to buy chocolate candy since I can't have it. So I opted for some things I hope kids will like. I haven't made any sales on my Etsy shop today. First day I've gotten goose egg since I opened it last week. I'm hoping it's because it's a holiday.

Michael left at 7 AM to go to work and he's still not back at 5:25PM. Working Saturdays and Sundays stinks and he's done a lot of them lately.

Wish I could see my grandchildren in their trick or treat outfits. But the pictures I've already seen are great. I know they will have fun.

Sore Muscles

I know you're probably tired of cemetery pictures but I tried to make these more interesting. I went to Fern Knoll where my grandparents are buried. It was a beautiful misty day. I had stopped off at the hardware store for a trowel (our old one is in a box somewhere) and a kneeling pad. I also took gardening gloves, a bucket, a black plastic garbage bag, an umbrella since it was threatening rain, and, of course, my camera. My goal was to uncover my grandmother's marker. I started with my grandfather since I could actually see part of his name. The picture shows just how much stuff I took off of it. My muscles are so sore! The stuff on the markers wasn't dirt. It was pine straw and hemlock needles which has turned into a kind of peat. I could actually roll it off the marker like carpet. I also did my grandmother's and four more. Hence, the soreness. I was using some muscles that needed a workout, I guess.

I've been talking about my cousin, J, and here she is. I feel bad I didn't have Michael take a picture of both of us together. She's standing in Shawnee Cemetery in Tamaqua.

Otherwise, a very dear friend in Denton, K, let me know yesterday that her dissertation was accepted and she's now a PhD. Hooray! And my Etsy shop is going great.

A Cemetery, Etsy and my maple tree

First my maple tree. It's enormous. You cannot even see my house. I'm approaching it from the back. But because of the weird fall, it did not turn red this year. So I guess we get variety. This year it turned yellow. In fact, most of the trees turned yellow this year. The exception is always the burning bush which is more hot pink than red in some varieties.

Second, the cemetery is Fern Knoll in Dallas. It's five minutes from my house. I have over fifty relatives buried here. It is quite gorgeous to walk through the Pennsylvania cemeteries in the fall. I'm going to have to take a yearly pilgrimage. I realized after the fact that I could have brought my GPS and marked the exact spot of the graves in all the cemeteries we visited. That would avoid a lot of tromping around.

Lastly, I have opened my own Etsy shop. My two daughters, N and G, have shops and they create things. But I'm just selling off the patterns I inherited. I had no idea what would happen when I cranked it up. I posted nine patterns last night and by this morning I had sold three. One was so hot that two people wanted it.

Who buys a pattern at 2:30 AM? (Well, it was a California sale so it was only 12:30PM for them.) But still... And one sale gets shippped to Spain. How exciting is that? If I can't go, at least my pattern can. I'll let you know how it goes. Just go to the Etsy website (www.etsy.com) and search sellers. My name is CoconutPie. If I were not so tired I'd have a link here. Ah well!

Couldn't resist

I know I should be blogging about all the wonderful family history stuff we discovered but I couldn't resist sharing these two. You'll have to click to enlarge both of them to get the full effect.

First picture: A large independent grocery store called the Sunshine Market went out of business recently. I really liked it but it was too far for me to go to shop. This is an ad for another local grocery chain called "Weis." If you can't read the ad, it says, "A Weis sunny welcome to our friends, old and new. Though Sunshine Market is closing...the sun's shining brightly at Weis." Ya think? Woo-hoo, another competitor out of business! I have no idea who thought up this tactless ad campaign, but I was appalled. Holy Schadenfreude! If you don't know the word "schadenfreude," it's an excellent one. It means "pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others."

Second picture: This one you must enlarge because it would spoil it to explain it. As I was taking pictures of the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Tamaqua, PA, I glanced over at a family crypt. Look carefully at the sign and the name on the crypt. It was just too good a photo to pass up. The family name was Hadesty, by the way.

Must run. I have lots of writing to catch up on. More important posts later, but you, like me, must need a laugh today.

150th Anniversary

Michael played in a concert yesterday, October 18th, with the Hazleton Liberty Band, celebrating its 150th anniversary. The concert began at the exact time the band was formed 150 years ago. They have all the records for the band (in the beginning in German) and have played continuously since that time. They enlisted as a group two years after they formed and served in the Civil War. This band still has the instruments that went to war.

It was really fun to see these folks celebrate a really old tradition in their town. Hazleton is south of us but still in the same county. They played the Hazleton Liberty Band March which was written for them by one of their directors, lots of patriotic tunes, a quickstep and a polka (Michael was very important to that number) and show tunes, movie tunes and even a cartoon medley. The crowd was rather elderly so the Animaniacs theme song was totally unknown to most of them. But they grooved on the Flintstones. I ended up being the official photographer. Somehow the newspaper missed the event. The last number was Auld Lang Syne which was played at Appomattox at the surrender. This band may have been the group which played it. They were definitely in attendance that day. In any case, a very historic and entertaining evening. And Michael played beautifully. He was oompah-perfect.

On another topic altogether, I'm wishing my darling daughter G a happy birthday today. She's come a long way since the days when she wore her favorite "I'm Three" barrettes. But she's still a cute little number.

Genealogy Spree

My cousin Judy came over from Chicago to do genealogical research and we hit a gold mine everywhere we went. It helped that she has this magic laptop with all of her fabulous research entered into it. Everywhere we went she could just bring up the info she already had and tie it into the new info we were finding everywhere.

We've managed to stand at the graves of our great-grandparents, our grandparents, several great-great grandparents and a great-great-great grandmother. We also found random things like a framed paper napkin with our grandmother's name on it from 1908. She had attended a class party. We found a stack of obits in local newspapers and found out that a great-grandfather and a great-great grandfather had been well-known for their singing abilities.

It's been completely amazing to find out all of these facts and realize that our ancestors in some cases were pretty important people around here. The downside is that of the fifty-plus graves of family members at Fern Knoll Cemetery, just up the road from my house, maybe ten are in good shape. The rest are buried and Michael and I will have a nice outing in the spring with shovels digging out the brass and marble plaques that are completely overgrown.

The first photo is of the plots in Fern Knoll where many more of my ancestors are buried than I believed possible. More on that strange story in the next post. The second picture, sadly, is all that you can see of my grandmother Florence's grave. It has been completely covered by pine needles and hemlock needles. So cleaning up all the family graves is a project I will complete when it stops snowing (maybe next April.)

Wacky wonderful Texas

It was great being back in Texas. The "welcome" mat is my daughter's who goes all out to decorate for Halloween. She has a pink Halloween tree with black garland and little stretchy skeletons hanging by the neck from black ribbon. She also has a big sign on the door that says "morgue." The black cat is my son's. His name is Winston. Z is living in a house with a couple of guys. The one who owns the house is a friend from childhood. The house is beautiful and spacious. About as unlike a boys' apartment as you can imagine. I also got to visit with Wrecks, Feynman and Mikey, the animals that keep my daughter company.

I loved the sky in Texas even if it was gray. And the parking spaces! Oh my goodness, they were so huge! There's just a lot of room there. The house in the photo was a surprise. Click on the photo for a close-up view. I was driving up Old North road toward the church building and saw this shack on the side of the road. It was in an area that had been laid out for lots and then abandoned. My thought was, "I don't remember a shack being there." Then I realized that it was a new construction. The whole neighborhood looks like sharecropper houses to me. Siding and weird shingles, tin roofs on the porches. You get the picture. It's the newest (oldest) thing. The houses reminded me of a lot of old houses here in PA, houses built in the twenties and thirties. Weird.

It was wonderful to see lots of old friends. I cried in the Kroger. I miss it so much. I brought back a suitcase full of Biskits. And I went back to Denton High and had lunch with my former department. That was also a thrill.

Also, there seems to be no recession in North Texas. Things are still booming which was pleasant to see.

I've been happy here in PA but the feeling I got when I left Denton was that it was a great place to raise our kids. We chose that town and Michael managed his career so that we would end up there. I realized this trip that we had made an excellent choice. It has everything: it's near a huge city with amazing museums and music, it has a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, there are two big universities that offered our kids a lot of opportunities, our kids got a fine public education and Denton is home to lots and lots of church members. I'm glad we were able to live there as long as we did.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

The first half of my trip last week was for Dad's 90th birthday. I was in Shreveport from Friday to Sunday. The weather was gorgeous and the family came out in full force. All but three of the grandchildren were there for the party and two of the great-grandchildren. (All of the children, of course, as my brothers and I put on the party.) My brother Keith is a newlywed and his new bride was absolutely essential. She planned all the decorating and she and Keith did a huge amount of work to put the party together. So thanks to them.

I also got to see my favorite uncle. Uncle Jim was there to tell great stories and I even got to bring home tapes of his best ones from Forest Hill, LA. The photos are of me with my Uncle Jim and my dad who is seated in the photo. The other photos are of my mom and the gorgeous birthday cake.

It was an awesome party and I think it came off without too much worry on my mom's part. I especially loved seeing all the first cousins and some spouses have a great time outside. Except for one young one who is still in elementary school, there is only an eight-year spread between all the Jones cousins who are in their early thirties or twenties. So the kids had a great visit.

I have a wonderful family and this kind of family get-together gives me something to look forward to as my children get older. I'd really like to have all of my kids and their spouses and kids together for a celebration and family get-together for our 40th anniversary. So that gives us until 2011 to work out the details.

Denton High School and other places

I went to Denton High School for lunch today. It was as if I had never left. Old friends have remained true and faithful. However, Denton High has not stayed the same. It's vast. They've added a whole new wing at the end of what we used to call the freshman or "West" wing. And they're adding another whole building. They've also completed a huge new field house. How could they do that so quickly? I got to see oodles of great folks and it was wonderful to see a few of my former students. The last batch I taught as freshmen are now seniors so I actually recognized a few faces.

I also went out to lunch with an old friend. That was so much fun. I had coconut cream pie. It's pretty hard to find a good piece of pie in Wilkes-Barre. This was the real thing with homemade custard and honest-to-goodness homemade pie crust. We had such a lovely time. Our husbands' careers are similar and we both have unmarried children. There was a lot to talk about. I realized that although the people in Wilkes-Barre are amazingly great, I haven't had the opportunity to develop those close friendships like I had in Denton. Tomorrow I get to see more old friends and tonight dinner with the children. They get the speech. For the unitiated, whenever one of our children did something remarkable or when they made straight A's we took them out and treated them to a meal or ice cream. There was always a speech though. We told them how proud we were of them. So tonight's speech will feature some mighty good grades, a scholarship or two and other accomplishments. Fun, fun, fun. And to my other two, I'm sorry I can't take you out too because you both deserve a good speech as well.

Home Sweet Texas

The birthday party in Shreveport was wonderful. I'll be posting pictures when I get home. We got a great turnout and it was really fun to see all the cousins (two of my kids and all but one of the others) visiting together. My parents will be getting three new great grandkids next year so that was fun. One was announced to my parents on Dad's birthday. None of them will be mine which is also unusual. Keith will have two new ones and Kevin his first.

I'm in Texas now and it feels good to be home. On the way to and from DFW to Shreveport and back I don't think I drove on more than a few miles of dry pavement. On the way to Denton Sunday afternoon I counted six cars that had run off the road. There was so much water. I even saw a doe and her fawn wading up to their chests off the side of the Interstate. I don't think I've ever seen a deer on I-20.

I had a great visit with N and Z last night and today I eat lunch with my buds at Denton High. I hope to see a few more old friends while I'm here. There were no church meetings on Sunday since it was general conference so I missed out on an opportunity to see a whole lot of folk on Sunday. But it worked out. I really needed to stay and help mom get beds made and the house somewhat back in order after the big party.

Denton still feels like home, so does Louisiana. And when I get home to PA it will also feel like home. I guess that's a good thing. The more homes the better, right?

Pictures and trip to Texas/Louisiana

I promised pictures and here they are. The gorgeous canned goods are from the central market. This was an Amish booth. And the choo-choo is a real working small scale steam engine at the Strasburg Railroad. Strasburg has a full-size steam engine with dining car which you can ride and the Pennsylvania State Railroad Museum. Fun! We didn't see either the museum or ride but we got to watch the steam engine come and go which was a thrill. And we saw the big locomotives outside the museum. We'll have to go back for that.

I'm on my way to Texas and Louisiana. I hope to see friends there. I'll be in Denton beginning Sunday night and leaving Wednesday morning. Monday night is reserved for my best buds in Denton, my children Z and N. I'll be in Louisiana for my dad's 90th birthday. How cool is that? So I'm off.