Celebrating and relaxing with a cruise

Dan and Eyvonne aboard a Carnival Cruise ship. To celebrate brother Ozzie's 21st birthday, and Dan's birthday, both in late July, they along with Anne Marie and Os took a cruise to Catalina and to Ensenada, Mexico.

On board the ship it was "tons of food, hanging out by the pool, etc.," Dan said. "Then when you stop you get off and do touristy things." The Catalina stop was a lot of fun, he said. "We took a 'semi-submersible' boat tour."

At the Mexican stop "it was like being in a big open air market, with people aggressively trying to get you to buy the most useless junk," but they took a bus tour out of town that included a stop at "La Bufadora" - a marine geyser.


Dan has a few more weeks to relax before resuming his studies at San Jose State University.

Andy back from a week in the woods

Andy returned home Saturday from a week at a Boy Scout camp in the Adirondacks. His Troop 33 from Fanwood spent the week at Sabbatis Adventure Camp in Long Lake, N.Y.


Frankly he didn't like the camp as much as those his troop has gone to in past summers. But he says he did enjoy being with his friends and "the wacky hijinks that ensued." And he completed some merit badge requirements that will help him earn his First Class rank this fall.

Check back - we may get pictures from the troop

Shanna fast-tracking toward Master's

Shanna has completed one class and started another as she gets a head start on her studies toward a Master's degree in childhood education.

"This class ends towards the end of August and then I have about a week off before starting my Fall semester at Mercy College," she said.

Shanna also took and received a high score on the Liberal Arts and Science Test (LAST), one of three tests needed to become a certified teacher in New York State.

See previous story

Andy on drums in "School of Rock" concert

Andy spent the past week at a "School of Rock" summer performance camp, and on Friday he joined the other camp-goers for a concert at the Sam Ash Music store in Springfield, N.J.

The musicians ranged in age from 9 to 16. After just one week of rehearsing daily, they took the stage in various groups of about five to eight players per song to play rock classics, including these two featuring Andy on drums:

Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze"



and the Beatles' "Helter Skelter"

Doug and Lisa pick a Vegas condo

Now that Doug will be working in the Las Vegas area for the next couple of years, he and Lisa have found a place to live. After a bit of shopping they picked a nice 2-bedroom condo. This is the view of the complex from their balcony.


Doug is moved in, and Lisa plans to join him in the fall once Becky heads to college at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Moon over Birch Street

We sat in the living room of the cottage on Birch Street in Noyac, straining to see and hear what was happening on the Moon.

Mom and dad, Kathy, Brien, Kevin and I were huddled around the little black-and-white TV we'd brought out from Yonkers for the occasion. We didn't usually watch television when were in "the country," but we had to watch this. The antenna could only pick up one decent signal -- Channel 8 in New Haven, Conn. -- so we watched ABC's coverage, with anchorman Frank Reynolds and science reporter Jules Bergman.

Watch brief excerpts from ABC's coverage

Between the low quality of the transmissions from the Moon, and the shaky signal from across Long Island Sound, it was difficult at times to follow just what was happening. Meanwhile I was trying to get the important moments on audio tape -- using a cassette recorder with a nasty habit of tangling the tape. My attention was divided between the screen and the wheels going around on the recorder.

The scratchy voice of Neil Amstrong said something about the LEM... and the cassette's take-up reel stuck. I quickly stopped the machine, popped out the cassette to straighten the tape, pushed it back in and resumed the recording. Of course, it was in that instant that Armstrong said: "That's one small step for a man..."

So the audiotape record that I was so intent on creating captured the historic moment thusly: "I'm stepping down from the LEM now. (CLICK POP) One giant leap for mankind."

I've felt guilty ever since that my fussing with the recorder distracted the rest of the family from that magic moment. Hopefully they were all ignoring me and focusing on the screen. Of course, the famous words have been replayed over and over in the years since. Meanwhile that cassette is probably in a box in our storage locker. But it would be hard to find a machine to play it on.

Waiting for the next step

This editorial by Dan ran in Monday's Star-Ledger.



It seemed like the future had truly arrived when Neil Armstrong’s boot touched the surface of the Moon 40 years ago tonight.

Those of us now of a certain age remember watching, enthralled, as the historic events unfolded in blurry black-and-white images on our 14-inch TV screens.

We knew we were living at the dawn of a new age when space travel would become commonplace and mankind would expand its realm beyond its home planet. It was only a matter of time.

Would be it 10 years, we wondered, or maybe 20, before we were all zipping around in rocket cars, taking weekend jaunts to our moon and vacations to Jupiter’s?

Countless TV shows, books and movies put our dreams into words and images. We imagined space travel as adventurous ("Star Trek"), mind-blowing ("2001: A Space Odyssey") and terrifying ("Alien"). David Bowie sang of it as captivating ("I think my spaceship knows which way to go") and Elton John as mundane ("All this science, I don’t understand/it’s just my job five days a week").

What we could not imagine, back then, was that we’d remain Earthbound. Yet come December, we will mark 37 years since the last time humans ventured to the Moon, or anywhere beyond Earth orbit.

Faced with the enormous costs of human space flight, we have settled for half-measures; we go, but not boldly. U.S. Space Shuttle and Russian Soyuz flights bring astronauts and scientists to the International Space Station for research programs that, however valuable scientifically, don’t inspire the public the way those Moon missions did.

NASA keeps the dreams alive: It has plans for new manned missions to the Moon by 2020, construction of a lunar outpost and research station, and then — someday — missions to Mars. Buzz Aldrin, the New Jersey native who stepped out on the Moon just after Armstrong, thinks we could get to the red planet in another 20 years if we put our minds and energy into it.

But there isn’t that kind of money in NASA’s budget, and at a time of economic recession when we're arguing over how to pay our medical bills, flights to Mars seem almost as fanciful now as they did pre-Apollo.

Meanwhile, technological advances — many of them spurred at least indirectly by the space program — have changed modern life in ways we did not imagine in 1969. We bounce signals off satellites in high orbit so a robot voice can tell us which street to turn on to get to the electronics store. There we can buy a hand-held device with more computing power than NASA mission control had for the Apollo missions.

Those black-and-white TV’s with antennas are now obsolete, replaced by digital high-definition screens on which we can watch . . . Well, a few of us saw last week’s lift off of Shuttle Endeavour, but we’re guessing a lot more people were watching SportsCenter.

The death of Walter Cronkite, for many of us the narrator of the lunar adventure -- which he later called "the most extraordinary story of our time" -- adds poignancy to today's anniversary.

Someday, assuredly, people will gaze at their LED screens (or whatever the latest version of television may be) and watch mankind take another giant leap into the future.

The question is whether it will happen in the lifetime of anyone who watched Armstrong’s one small step.

They're enjoying summer - How about you?

Christine, her boyfriend Matt, and Andy enjoy the surf at Belmar, N.J. on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, July 19.

How's your summer going?
Please share your fun with the family
here on the Birch Street Web.
E-mail us at birchstreetweb@gmail.com,
or just click on "comments" below and leave a note.
Keep in touch!

Dan & Julie's little anniversary getaway (Updated with slideshow)

Dan and Julie celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary on 07/08/09 (that's gotta be some kind of good luck) by taking a little short-distance vacation in northwestern New Jersey.

We stayed at a B&B called the RoseMary Inn, in Knowlton Township near the Delaware Water Gap. The owners said they opened it about a year and a half ago after extensively renovating a former farmhouse. The house and grounds are beautiful, and as we were the only guests at midweek, we felt like we it was our own private getaway.



Our little trip included a stop at a winery for a tasting, driving in and around the Delaware Water Gap national park, walks in the woods to see waterfalls, a couple of great dinners, a play at a community theater, and more driving around the Jersey countryside checking out little towns.

The photo at the top of the entry is at Dingman's Falls, on the Pennsylvania side of the water gap. Below is another series of falls farther up Dingman's Creek, which comes down from the Poconos into the Delaware River.



Want to see more? Click the slideshow. Double-click for larger views.

Ka-Boom! Happy Fourth

Here's the finale of the fireworks show that Dan, Julie, Andy, Christine and Christine's boyfriend Matt watched in Mountainside, N.J., on Saturday night.


Did you see fireworks? Where and with whom? Got any pics?
Please share them with the family here on Birch Street Web!

Doug's firm wins Nevada highway contract

Review-Journal photo

Doug will be working in Las Vegas for the next couple of years as a group including his firm, Jacobs Engineering, has won the contract for a design-build project to widen Interstate 15 to the south of the city.

Read the reports in the Las Vegas Sun and the Review-Journal

Doug has already spent must of the last several months in Nevada working on the contract bid. He'll head back out on Monday. Lisa plans to join him there in September once Becky begins college at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Nevada DOT image

Dan and Eyvonne see family, friends and sights on East Coast tour

Dan and Eyvonne took an East Coast trip that included lots of get-togethers with family and friends plus some New York City tourism.

The gatherings included a birthday party for Dan and Marie's grandmother Joan in South Jersey that brought together all of her children and grandchildren. Marie and Brian and Xander were there as well, and it was the first chance for Xander to meet some of his uncles, aunts and cousins.


On Sunday night, Dan and Julie and Christine and Andy joined Dan, Eyvonne, Marie, Brian and Xander for dinner at Mastori's, a well-known diner/restaurant in central Jersey. It was a great time, and Xander was on his best behavior.

Hi Hopes as high art

During a Father's Day gathering at the Midland Avenue homestead, Kathy and Ted gave Daniel a beautiful painting of Hi Hopes, the family's long-serving motor boat, at its Mill Creek mooring.



"Kathy spotted it at the artist's studio at the Noyac Marina (now called Hidden Cove Marina)," Daniel writes. "The artist, who didn't know whose boat it was, said that many visitors to his studio had admired the painting. It looks almost like a photograph."

Daniel and Lorraine are hoping to head out to Noyac for the season very soon.

Happy summer!

For most of the students in our family, school's out for the summer. Shanna is an exception, taking two summer classes at Mercy College toward her master's degree.

What are your summer plans? Traveling, or working, or just relaxing? Please share your stories, thoughts and ideas with the rest of the extended family. Keep in touch!

Stitching, pitching and catching up

Dolores and Hugh were in Columbus, Ohio, in mid-June for a meeting of the International Council of Needleart Associates and related activities, which included an evening at a Columbus Clippers baseball game, joined by daughter Cathy.



From June 13-15, the National NeedleArts Association sponsored "The NeedleArts Market" in Columbus. TNNA is a trade organization representing shop owners who market supplies to needle workers—knitters, quilters, embroiderers, and needlepointers, for example. The NeedleArts Market brings more than one thousand purveyors of yarn, needlework kits, painted canvas designs, accessories, and other needleworker gadgets to display and sell their wares to the shop owners.

At the same time TNNA hosted a meeting of the International Council of Needleart Associates (ICNA), an umbrella group of representatives of needlework organizations all over the world. The National Academy of Needlearts (NAN) is one of those organizations, and as it happens, Dolores is the NAN representative to ICNA. That brought Dolores and Hugh to Columbus, where Cathy and her family now live.

TNNA has developed a promotion to interest people in the needle arts called Stitch N’ Pitch where stitchers are encouraged to take their work to a baseball game and stitch as they watch the game. And so they did, at the Clippers game on Saturday night, June 13. Dolores, Hugh and Cathy joined the crowd in the Stitch N’ Pitch reserved left field section.



The Clippers are a Triple A farm team of the Cleveland Indians, and their opponents on the Stitch N’ Pitch night were the Louisville Bats. Since the Bats are the farm team of the Cincinnati Reds, it was an all-Ohio game. The Clippers play in Huntington Park, a brand new ballpark that very much resembles a smaller version of Camden Yards!

It was a well played game. Unfortunately for the home team, the Bats won 7-2 with strong pitching and timely hitting.

The local Columbus NBC TV affiliate sent a camera man to cover the Stitch N’ Pitch event. The eleven o’clock news featured an interview with one of the people from TNNA, and they showed pictures of several people stitching while they watched the game. To our surprise, one of the stitchers on TV was Dolores!

Read Hugh's more complete account of the event

Ted's 'On the Road' chronicles

Ted writes...
Between 4/16/09 & 5/13/09, I took a ride on my motorcycle around the USA. Crazy, I know.

I rode over 10,000 miles through 28 states. Kathy met me in Sedona and then again in Chicago. ... Every three days or so, I would send back little stories, or letters from the road...

Ted has shared his dispatches and photos with us.
So come along for the ride.
Read Ted's On the Road Chronicles.

Soccer season nearing an end

Patrick has had two shut-outs this season as goalkeeper for the Mount Vernon team in the Westchester Youth Soccer League high-school-age boys division.

His team, called the Mount Vernon Buick Storm, holds a 4-2-2 record with one game left to play.

Meanwhile Christine's Scotch Plains-Fanwood team will play its final game next weekend. Her team finished the regular season with a 4-1 won-loss record. The same team that gave them their only regular-season defeat also beat them in the first playoff round, so they'll be playing for third place.

New school is 'old school' for Shanna

Shanna has found herself in familiar surroundings as she begins working on a masters degree.

"I have decided to go to Mercy College for my Masters in Childhood Education," Shanna writes.

"Although I was originally planning to start school in the fall, I was given the opportunity to get a head start on the program and take a few classes this summer, so I am enrolled in two courses.

"The classes will be intense since they are so condensed for summer, but I am excited about them."

"The funny thing about it is the classes are actually being given in my old high school, which shares a campus with Mercy. Who knew that nearly 10 years after I started high school, I would be right back in the same building starting graduate school!"

See previous story