Buckeye's Blog

This is a great group!  Amazing history to it.  If you live in the Bay Area you might like to know about this club.  Here is the website Chang Folk Dance Club 

Link to the big article in the SF Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/27/DD0G11EU47.DTL&hw=chang+folk+dance+club&sn=001&sc=1000  

This is an easy to watch cartoon with catchy music that has an important message.  I saw it on local TV.  It's only 3 mins. long...check it out!

Rusty Crayfish native to Ohio.

1950's girl's Roadmaster bike.  But mine was blue....

What did you do for fun when you were a kid? How is it different from what you see kids doing now?
Submitted by jaklumen.

Good Question!

The big difference was play time was unscheduled. And of course no computers etc.  The radio was IT. I played with the neighbor kids, with my dogs, spent a lot of time in the stream in the woods in my father's waders looking for creatures.  We kids used to lie on flat rocks and drop strings with bread attached (I forgot how) into the water and try to catch crawfish. Not too successful :))  I also spent a huge amount of time reading, drawing, playing old 78's with my fingernail (yes, it works...the cactus needle was missing).  One friend and I used to mix up potions from the remains of bottles in the trash (good college prep, yes?)  Lying on the grass looking up at the sky and clouds was good.  And actually I spent considerable amount of time as a younger child, jumping off rocks and waving my arms trying to fly.  Never worked :((        And then, there was Kick the Can on a Summer Evening with all age neighbor kids involved.

    Like most families then we only had one car. Mostly my Dad used it to go to work.  We lived in the country (now suburb) and  I used my bicycle for both transportation and fun a lot.  Just an old blue and white Roadmaster.

   I feel badly for overscheduled kids today....and organized sports, especially these traveling teams, have just eliminated free time to spend with siblings and parents.  Family dinners were taken for granted when I was a kid.  It wasn't necessary for there to be a magazine article recommending the practice.  It must be very hard for parents to go against all this activity.  But eating in the car all the time on the way to somewhere is really tough. My children were more scheduled that I was as a youngster.  But they still had a lot of free time; most dinners were at home.

   Everything changes.  I keep relearning that every day it seems.

These are crotins on top....Official Goat in the middle....Official Granddaughter with Official Goats on the bottom.  From a goat farm in California.

Grandfather's Welsh Chair

This chair is a tribute to the work ethic of the Welsh people, my forebears on my father's side.  I cannot sit in this chair for more than about 2 minutes because that horizontal piece in the back hits just in the Wrong Place!  Still I love the chair and its matching footstool.  It is now at my daughter's house. 

Racionz

My husband's family came from this Jewish town in Poland which was destroyed during World War II.  I have an uneasy feeling about that large crowd of people over on the right side of the photo.  On the left side is a partial postmark.  I don't know what year this is.  I found the photo online.

What was your first car?

A new Chevy Nova.  It was a big deal because it had air conditioning and it was our first Second Car.  Before that we had one car and it just became impossible to work and also to drive my husband back and forth to work.  I had just started working in real estate in 1977 and I insisted on AC.  It was white and had a blue interior.  Isn't it funny how some of us get so attached to our cars we would just drive them forever? 

What's the biggest leap of faith you've ever had to take?

Going with my husband and young children to live on a kibbutz in Israel, perhaps to stay.  We were there for a year and a half and then returned to the US.

from Terri Cullen's column in the Wall St. Journal....

"Some online companies can help consumers bypass automated systems. GetHuman.com has a database of companies' customer-service numbers along with directions on which numbers to press (or not to press) to get a human on the line. Bringo.com does the work for me -- I enter my phone number, and the site calls customer service, then calls me back and connects me when it's reached a live person or when my call has been placed in a queue awaiting a customer-service agent."