OH, what a day!

It starts out to be a great day.  We are on the road early, eager to get to Lamoine State Park where we have been accepted to be volunteer Campground Hosts.  The drive through the woods of Maine from Houlton to Lamoine is beautiful even though we are on an interstate highway.  Our goal is to take secondary “blue highways” (often drawn on maps in blue) as William Least Heat Moon calls  them in his Blue Highways book but today we take the fast route. We arrive at Lamoine State Park about 12:30PM and are greeted by friendly rangers and volunteers.  So far so good!  Let’s get our fifth wheel set up!   Here’s where the day goes, as the saying goes “to hell in a hand basket!”

UH-OH-the entrance to our site isn’t very wide and there are rain runoff ditches on either side.  AND. . .trees, lots of trees, and brush on either side of the road making maneuvering very touchy.  Gary, who loves a challenge, gives backing into the site a try  --- nope, the wheels of the fifth wheel start falling into the ditch and the nose of the truck is deep into brush and trees across the road.

On to plan B-back in from the other direction.  Hey, it’s working until. . .the fifth wheel starts shifting and leaning into what turns out to be soft earth!  Oh no! The rather large tree and our home are becoming perilously close - 6 inches or less!!In my mind I envision the side being bashed in and with it the refrigerator which, inside, is exactly beside the tree.Gary jockeys the truck back and forth trying to get out of the rut but the rut only gets deeper.  This rig is going nowhere-not forward, not backward without it sliding toward the tree!  He and Bob  slip boards under the tires by jacking the whole rig up with bottle jacks.  Inch  by inch it is moved forward but THEN there is no more room for the truck to go forward because of the trees.  Can’t go forward, can’t go back!Let’s see now, if we could only swing it around to the left just a bit.  Gary unhooks our GMC and very carefully, almost inch by inch, ranger Bob’s VERY HUGE Mack truck pivots the fifth wheel just a few feet.  Gary hooks up the GMC again and eases the fifth wheel over the boards, the boulders, a granite slab the Ranger has dropped into the ditch but, oh-oh, the 17,500 lb. fifth wheel is sinking again!  Keep it moving Gary!  He does and, five hours after this odyssey began, we are safely out.  WHEW, WHEW and double WHEW!Now what?  Will we be staying at Lamoine State Park or will we have to leave?  For tonight we make NO decisions.  We boondock in the parking lot for the night (for you non-RVers, boondocking is parking with no water, electric or sewer hookups.)  With the electric coffee and tea maker out of commission, I dig out the good old percolator and tea kettle for my morning Earl Grey and Gary’s Maxwell House. The not-so-scenic view of the parking lot from our window.A new day dawns with a decision to be made.  Is it back on the road or ??  Dulee and I go for our morning walk and see that they have moved the granite block to the other side and filled in dirt over the ditch to make the entrance about four feet wider.  Gary says “piece of cake!" and we’re soon in position for day two’s maneuvers.   The fifth wheel moves pretty smoothly over the makeshift arrangement with just a little sinking into the dirt and the boards crack as it passes over but we are soon set up in our Camp Host site. Much better clearance with the tree!

We’re home for the next couple of months!

My age: I’m Beyond. . .

One of the segments on the Today Show a few days ago was “How to look good in your 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and beyond.”  Wow, my age is beyond!  BEING a beyond is not a problem, but did I like being clumped into beyond?  Well, I wasn’t so sure, so I googled “50 and beyond” and came up with a wealth of BEYOND:

A magazine article Hairstyles for Women 40-50 and beyond is quite positive but still manages to convey the beyond group as being pretty anonymous:  “Women who are over forty, over fifty or beyond should wear their hair in any style they choose.  If your hair makes you feel good and you like the way it looks, wear it with confidence”  Even though I have this hair that does what it wants to with no regard to my choice, this is still good helpful information for beyonds! So far so good.

 Loving Life at 50 ~and Beyond  This is really a pretty nice blog with a great watercolor background. 

Staying Slim in your 40’s, 50’s and beyond.  This blog has some good information which is divided into two categories: “40’s” and “50’s and beyond” 

A workout video by Angela Rippon Fabulously Fit at 50 & Beyond (No, I don’t workout so didn’t even watch it all the way through!)

Weightwatchers even has a group called FABulously Fit B4 50 & BEYOND!

I found a Beyond 50 Radio blog.

I like the description of Susanna Starr’s book Fifty and Beyond, New Beginnings in Health and Well-Being
“A non-authoritarian approach to fitness and well-being, aimed especially at people approaching and beyond age fifty (50). An inspiration during a time of mid-life for those who are ready for new beginnings. Clear and insightful suggestions for developing our potential through expanding the mind, caring for the body and celebrating the spirit.”

I read a few of this blogger’s very moving posts on Zero to Sixty and beyond and will be following her.

SOOO. . . my conclusion: although it feels somewhat like being in a grey cloud, beyond is not such a bad age.  While I have nothing against my chronological age I just may have changed my age to beyond!

Gary & I before we were beyond.

And here we are, both age beyond.

I saw my first moose in Maine!

Well, it isn’t a real moose but it is life size!  A man we talked to in this little park by the Meduxnekeag River (NO, I can’t pronounce Meduxnekeag  and YES, I had to look up the spelling!) said that if we stay in Maine very long we will see a live one.  I’m on the watch!

Other moose we’ve encountered in our travels:

1998 at Denali National Park in Alaska.  This was before digital cameras were readily available---I wish I’d had the 26X zoom Nikon camera I now have!

She(?) was enjoying her lunch! This was taken in 2002, the summer we were docents at the Brig Museum at Farragut State Park in Idaho.  We were on our way to visit the Carnegie Library in nearby Wallace and spotted her in a lake beside the highway.

By this time I’d had my Sony Mavica digital camera for a few years and used the 3X zoom to take this photo.

Thanks for stopping by to see my moose!

Why oh why isn’t the plural of moose, meese?

I’m going to make books! Correction: I’ve made a book!

I found this book in the gift shop of the Renwick Gallery, the Smithsonian gallery which features American craft and decorative arts.  Umm, I can do this; I have no artistic talent but am creative and can follow directions very well!  Rather than carrying the book around that day I waited, found it on Amazon.com and saved about $10 over suggested retail.  I LOVE a deal!

The layout of the book seems to progress from very simple to difficult so I started by making this instant book from Chapter One-Instant Books. 

Instructions for making an instant book are quite simple and I mastered it very quickly.  Fold, fold, fold, fold, snip, pull apart and re-fold into book form---that’s it!  A book! 

Combining this newly acquired bookmaking skill with my computer skills I printed an 8-1/2” X 11” sheet of paper with graphics of a daisy, a birthday cake and birthday greetings to my sister. First go-round I had the birthday cake upside down so had to go back to the drawing board/computer. Second attempt was a success!

OK, that’s a little bit TOO simple, I’m moving on to the chapters on accordions, stab stitch, chapbooks, mutant (mutant. . . that sounds intriguing!), long stitch and Coptic books.  I’m working my way through the “How to Make Books” book.

Wait a minute!  I almost forgot that I made accordion books for our three children a few years ago. . . and I made them without any instructions!  I’m glad I took pictures of them.

A message to the kids is on the inside cover. 

Three copies of each of the items in her wallet await assembling in the accordion books.

The covers are a stiff cardboard covered with black fabric to simulate the black plastic of Grandma Mary’s wallet. For the title on the front cover I found tiny scrapbooking frames at Michael’s Craft store.

Black poster paper was just thick enough but still folded quite easily into accordion “pages.”

Reverse side of the replica of a wallet photo holder.

I wonder how close I came to author Esther Smith’s method?  I’m not going to peek ahead; will wait until I get to that chapter!

This has absolutely nothing to do with books, but have to show you the wonderful lobster we had for dinner last night.  Price:  including a quart of (the best) clam chowder, the dinner for two was $36.84!  (yes, we are in Maine)

Happy Memorial Day

Hope everyone has their Old Glory flying!  Gary dug out the flag my Mom gave him a long time ago and has it suspended from our awning.  He’s had it so long that I asked him if it had 50 stars!

As always we have our American, California and racing flags on the front of the fifth wheel.

And look at the cute stylized banner I bought the other day at the Lobster Shack at Two Lights where we had lunch. I thought it would be perfect for Memorial Day.  Food Note:  the lobster rolls were to die for!

We had lunch today at The Lobster Claw here in Saco, Maine. . .as you can see they are also decked out for the day!  Food Note #2: my clam strips were wonderful as was Gary’s haddock!

Is there a better way to honor our military and remember our loved ones on Memorial Day?  I don’t think so!

HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY!

Eleanor Roosevelt. . .a Blogger before Blogging?

We have been visiting the presidential libraries and museums and, so far have managed to do all but Eisenhower, Ford and, of course, since I’m a Californian, Nixon and Reagan’s.   (George Bush’s is still in the planning stages, I believe.)

Some are more interesting and personal than others but last week I really enjoyed the home tour and visit of Franklin D. Roosevelt home,  Presidential Library and Museum in the quaint little village of Hyde Park, New York.  I was struck by the level of Eleanor Roosevelt’s importance and influence in her husband’s career, especially after he was struck by polio at the age of thirty-nine.   She served as his eyes and ears while traveling to places he wasn’t able to go.  She not only has a wing in the Museum/Library dedicated to her but she is the only First Lady who has been honored with having a National Historic Site dedicated to her!   Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site  is the location of Vall-Kill, her retreat and later home from 1945 until her death in 1962. 

As I browsed her wing in the presidential library I noted that among her many works was a syndicated column she wrote six days a week from 1935 to 1962.  Reading a snippet I noticed that it was quite short and written in a chatty personal manner.  “Hey, that sounds much like the blogs of today!”  Later on-line I found that the columns have been preserved and found subjects as Housewives, the Peace Corp, White House weddings during WWII, various causes she supports and her life and travels.  The same type things we all blog about although we don’t generally throw names like  “the new king of Saudi Arabia (1954)” and Fidel Castro into our blogs.  I liked My Day February 14, 1954 where she mentions attending an executive committee meeting of the United Nations and then later shares the Girl Scouts recipe for s’mores!

This is her May 3, 1943 column: (just happens to be my birthday)

WASHINGTON, Sunday—I have just read a book by Ethel Gorham: "So Your Husband's Gone to War!" It is entertaining and full of good common sense advice. I think pages 122 and 123 should be read and reread by every woman. It is a universal experience and sometimes it isn't only what happens in marriage.

Sisters and brothers, mothers and sons, girls and their sweethearts have sometimes found that furloughs were not all that they had planned. The men they were with were not the men who went away. Somehow, they were entirely different—moody, perhaps too gay, quite evidently covering something by the gaiety, anxious to forget instead of telling all the experiences which they want so much to hear.

This is just a sample of many other things which you will find useful in this little book and which, on the whole, is quite delightful to read. I loved the little bit about the woman who tried to give up her home and send her child away and found that it created for her husband, off at the war, only a sense of terrible insecurity, because he felt he had no real home which he remembered anywhere in the background to which he could cling, and for which he was actually fighting.

Many a husband would not have been honest enough to stop his wife in time. He might have thought he owed it to the woman to let her do the thing she thought wisest. Yet, as a matter of fact, all she needed to make the effort to go on living as usual, was the knowledge that the home he knew meant security to the man somewhere for beyond her ken.

What it must mean to those men so far away to be able to turn their thoughts for a minute to something they feel is fixed and stable in their world of home, something they love, something that is their real life, not this interim which, somehow or other, they must fight through.

And now, to something in lighter vein. Franklin P. Adams has just gotten out an anthology of light verse. It is called "Innocent Merriment," and while I know these poems are his favorites, I am sure you will find plenty of your own there, too. Who does not like Christopher Morley': "The Gospel of Mr. Pepys," ending:

"When kisses are a shilling each
We should adventure on a few."

No one could grow up without, somewhere along the road, having enjoyed Lewis Caroll's "Father William." So, when you want a pleasant hour, pick up "Innocent Merriment."

E.R.

(COPYRIGHT, 1943, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC.)

Reads like a modern blog doesn’t it?  If you could like to read more: “My Day”

Eleanor Roosevelt’s serene and peaceful Val-Kill.

Our nation’s Capitol. . . cleared security and cleared security and cleared security again!

Security checks have been the norm at pretty much all of the Smithsonian and government venues we’ve visited during our month in Washington, D.C.  Normally they involve a bag check and maybe a walk through a security sensor but during the course of the tours of the U.S. Capitol and Library of Congress we went through SEVEN security checks, and that’s not including the cursory check as we exit the Library of Congress.  They begin as we enter the Longworth House Office Building to meet at Congressman Farr’s office.   I “beep” when I go through, am “wanded” and pass muster. . .we are in the building!  We met our tour guide, an intern from UC Santa Cruz, and set out on the tour.

This is just the beginning!  We walk down a long hallway between the Longworth and the Cannon House Office buildings, then another underground hall to the Capitol, stop at the security desk in the Capitol where we are issued clip-on badges and also stick-on Capitol tour badges. 

On to the galleries of the House of Representatives and Senate chambers.  On the way to the House of Representatives we wait in a line to surrender cameras and other electronics.  (I was relieved that I had left my purse with our phones in Congressman Farr’s office.)  We walk through the security check point,  I “beep” when I go through, am “wanded” and pass muster and we are seated in the House gallery.

Walking through one of the hallways our group is nabbed by a security person:  “you don’t need those” and takes the clip-on badges.

We leave the House gallery, wind our way back to the security desk, pick up the camera and follow our tour guide back to the (same) elevator. . .hey, that’s the security person we just passed!  Are we stuck in a maze?

Then we are back into another line to surrender my camera --- is that the same room where I surrendered it for the House?  No, this is for the Senate.  I have no idea how we got here!  We weave our way up to the entrance for the Senate Gallery and, you guessed it, walk through another security check point where I “beep”, am “wanded” and pass muster (again,) and we are seated in the Senate gallery where we watch our senators at work.  They are taking a vote on a judicial appointment but don’t sit down and vote.  Instead they wander in, verbally give the clerk their vote and wander back out of the chambers.  We see John McCain!

Us, with Andrew Jackson in the National Statuary Hall in the Capitol.

At the Library of Congress our belongings go through the conveyor belt and we walk through the sensor.  Yes, I “beep” again but, OOPS, I forgot about my IPhone in my pocket!  Back through the process again and I pass muster!

The Great Hall of the Library of Congress. . .one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen!

During the War of 1812 the British burned the Capitol and the Library of Congress.  Thomas Jefferson had acquired the largest personal collection of books in the United States and offered to sell his library to Congress as a replacement.  Congress purchased Jefferson's library for $23,950.  A second fire on Christmas Eve of 1851, destroyed nearly two thirds of the 6,487 volumes Congress had purchased from Jefferson.  Now, the Library of Congress is attempting to reassemble Jefferson’s original collection and it is currently on special exhibit.   Couldn’t take pictures but it was awesome standing among books that he actually owned, touched and read!  (I know I’ve digressed from my “security story” but he is one of my favorites!)

As we are shooed out of the Library when it closes at 5:30 p.m. I must again open my bag for a final security check!  Whew!

Note:  At one of the security “wandings” the guard asks me if I have an artificial knee or other part. . .I say no, I am in possession of all of my original parts!

Just an ordinary day in Washington, D.C. . .Wow!

After visiting the off-the-National Mall beaten path Smithsonian Renwick Gallery we walked by the northern side of the White House.   While planning for the President’s House George Washington felt that it should be “Not too grand but grand enough” and that’s what it is.

So, since we were there we thought we might as well walk a little further (my feet weren’t hurting THAT MUCH  yet) and go around to the southern entrance.

Security personnel soon moved us away from the sidewalk saying it was a periodic thing they do.  When we noticed that the snipers on the roof of the White House and a couple of the nearby office buildings seemed to be especially vigilant we decided to hang around and see why they had shooed everyone away. 

Soon we saw people gathering on the lawn near the entrance. Something was going on!

Then one lone helicopter made a pass but flew on by.

Followed shortly by three big copters which flew east to west but these three also flew on by. (Sorry, but I couldn’t get all three in one photo.)

and then behind us from the south came ONE, then a SECOND both of which flew over the Washington Monument and the White House, and THEN a THIRD approaching much more slowly.

--- it was Air Force One with the President aboard!  I’m guessing that he was returning from the Ground Zero trip to NYC.

Coming in for the landing.  I could see Secret Service agents moving out to various places on the lawn.

On the ground at precisely 4:00 p.m.  The observers were clapping and taking pictures.  He debarked on the far side but I'm sure I saw his shoes!

A quick couple of minutes and Air Force One took off directly toward. . .

and over our heads!

Quite a special happening we hadn’t planned for. . .WOW!

Lunch. . .and another Carnegie Library!

Found a Carnegie Library by accident yesterday wandering around D.C.  We were driving on Pennsylvania Avenue in the Southeast section of the city when I caught a glimpse (as coach John Madden once said “out of the corner of my right eye”) down a side street. . . Carnegie Libraries have a distinctive architecture.  I told Gary to hook a U, which in the traffic took several blocks but we maneuvered back and there it was....sure appeared to be a Carnegie so I snapped a couple of photos through the window.  When we got home I looked it up and, yes, it is the Southeastern Branch which opened in 1922.  I will have to try and get back and see the interior.  This brings my total to seventy-one.  I don’t know how many are still standing but Andrew Carnegie gave grants for 1,689. . .I have a few more to visit don’t I?

Had lunch in a Cheesecake Factory in Chevy Chase - Eggs Benedict is probably my favorite breakfast and mine was SO good! Gary had a Monte Cristo sandwich he said was delicious - wish I could have had both! (but no, I didn’t!) We were too full for dessert and passed on their delicious cheesecake but wish I had gotten a piece to-go 'cause it would have gone so good last night! Oh well, saved the calories.