My recent trip to Newark, NY

September 5th - 9th I visited my parents in upstate NY in the small town of Newark where I grew up. The purpose of my visit was to help them get their house ready to sell next spring. It also happens that my 42nd birthday fell on Sep 6th, during my visit. My Mom asked what type of cake I wanted for my party and I had my answer ready - not cake, but apple pie (with a scoop of vanilla ice cream of course)! I had been dreaming about the homemade pies I grew up with - apple, cherry, peach, rhubarb, blueberry and probably some I've forgotten. We had peach and cherry trees when I was growing up and my Mom often made us pies made from the freshly picked fruits.

As I recall, the apple tree in our back yard wasn't quite mature enough for us to use the fruit. However, on this occasion it was full of ripe apples. My sisters, Grace and Bridget, made the pie from apples off my parent's tree. That, combined with my Mom's homemade pizza, made for a memorable birthday party. In addition to my parents, several of my siblings were there - Grace, Jim, Bridget, Maureen and Matt, along with spouses, nieces and nephews. When it came time to sing Happy Birthday, I put my wife Kim and my three children - Elizabeth, Andrea, and Joshua on the speaker phone to sing along from back home in Orlando, FL. It's a birthday I won't soon forget.

During my stay, my brother Matt and I managed to cut down 12 bushes from my parent's front yard. The bushes were 35 years old and proved to be stubborn. With some back-breaking labor and a little help from my brother-in-law Mike's van, we pulled the first couple root balls out. The rest came out with a lot of sweat and digging.

Photos courtesy of my brother Matt.

The before shot

The neighbor's chainsaw made quick work of the branches

Getting the roots out was the toughest part...

But the end result was worth it

Matt, Dad, and I helped Mike put up some of the ceiling panels on the covered porch and we painted some of the more difficult to reach areas.

Finally, I was able to spend some time working on their computer, transitioning the AOL email program over to Firefox, which seemed to speed up their email and web surfing considerably. If all goes well, they will be able to read this blog faster than ever before.

There was much more we did than I could possibly fit in a blog entry, but suffice to say that it was a great trip. I look forward to making more frequent visits in the future.

Peace and blessings,
John

Andrea Gets Creative

I love it when my children find a hidden talent and put it to good use. Recently, Andrea took up an interest in molding characters out of clay. She looked at some pictures of Wallace and Gromit and molded them out of clay. You can see the results below. Not bad!



Andrea's next project is to work on Lady Tottington from the Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Who knows, maybe someday she'll get a job working on one of the movies?

I'm flying up to a little town east of Rochester, NY to visit my parents this weekend. We will be working on some projects to help get their house ready to sell in the next year. They've lived there for over 35 years and I grew up in that house, so it'll be tough to see it go, but maintenance is getting tough for them.

Hope you all had a good Labor Day.

P&B,

John