Asbury park is alive again.

Near death experience.

Coming home from work one day and running a little later than usual, just a few minutes from home when, along a small and winding road near a river by an old style family amusement park called "Bushkill Park" along one part of the winding road came a car. The car was veering very quickly onto my side of the road. I kept thinking that this person would correct the line of their car and get back into their own lane. It immediately became apparent that he was heading straight for me. The only thing I could do was really speed up whilst screaming at the same time. He had just missed hitting my side by an inch literally. As I recovered my composure I looked in the rear view and the SOB was all the way over on my side of the road. If I had been 5 seconds later I would have been in a box 6 feet under by now.
I had this surreal feeling of being spaced out just thinking about how I could have been in hospital that night.

Pyjama Night at Ritas.

Do you know your vowels?

Picture this, because I am willing to bet that you have never heard a story like this before. Its Saturday night about 10pm and there is nothing special going on. Marc asks for some water, and I decide if he wants water then he should know how to spell it. Well he starts out with W...good! and then follows with some generic consenants. So I ask Marc "do you know your vowels"?, and in the course of Jill and I teaching it to him, Jill starts by singing A-E-I-O-UUUUUUUU. So in an effort to forever burn this into Marcs brain we sing it out in a hummy nasally fashion A-E-I-O-UUUUUUU....oh maybe 50 times. It occurs to me that this may just look and sound quite funny to anyone within earshot and even for anyone to hear of this story. To have Marc sing it back and for him to miss E in the process of getting it right is very very funny. Another priceless memory for all of us. Remember when we taught Marc his vowels?!!!.

Oh yeah its family night and the feelings right.!

Last night Palmer pool had its family night. Usually the pool closes at 8pm but last night they stayed open until 11pm as they planned what is called a family night. I was hoping for this night to be stinking hot but it did not turn out that way and indeed it was around 80 degrees Fahrenheit / 25 degrees Celsius. We had a very nice meal of steak broccoli and smashed jacket potatoes and then around 7.45pm we went over to the pool. I got in while the sun was still up and the water was lovely and warm while Jill decided to read a magazine, time passed by and pretty soon it was around 8.30pm and then finally Jill got in. It was nice to stay longer than the usual 8pm and the lights in the pool were turned on. Around 9pm Marc and I got out and it was cold in the night air so we changed out and after about 30-40 minutes we changed back into the damp suits and spent the rest of the time in the water. We got home around 11.15pm and wentot sleep a few hours later. Right now we are preparing to go to the pool again after less than 12 hours of leaving it.

Lack of sleep and its funny effects.

The last few months have seemed to me to be very busy ones, either that or the constant day to day work routine and having Friday come around as a saviour to the week in general. For me Monday has always been the start of a week and now that we as a family are in the midst of summer there is an intense desire to use every single day. This is actually more apparent in Jill than myself as she swears that she may have the SAD. Seasonal adjustment disorder the coming and going of the seasons and Jill has never liked the cold months. I have always been pragmatic about the seasons but perhaps coming from Ireland one can take that point of view. Any small part of the warm weather in Ireland we are always grateful for, whilst Jill has always had the good summers followed by the bitter cold winter and spring. So in effect the climate swing is greater in the states than it is in Ireland, Irish people accept it for what it is...may not like it but accept it, Ireland has the more constant type of weather but not the major swing in climate as is experienced here in the states.
Getting back to my main point it is this clammering to enjoy the summer to the fullest and fill all the weekends with major activities that has made me somewhat tired. Add into the mix the family life and a busy work day where there is always something going on that makes Jill and I tired. Now bear this in mind when I say that I have recently realised I have always had this quirk of initiating conversations late at night. As a pre-teen and teenager and even adult when I shared a room with my brother I used to always talk to him just at the point where he was about to drop off to sleep and this would annoy him quite a bit. Jill is always busy and gets up early and due to my nocturnal activities in watching tv late she doesnt always get the amount of sleep she maybe would like. I am aware of this but she never says anything to me about it so the status-quo continues. As if this wasnt bad enough she has my babbling to deal with late at night.
Last night I was so tired myself but on BBC America I was watching some chat show and Ardal O'Hanlon was on and he was extremely funny and I continued to watch as a consequence of this I was laughing at his comments and telling out loud to Jill what was said. I cant remember how the whole dialogue went but I remember thinking that it was so funny that I needed to write about it and it would have been wrote just like dialogue from a movie and you as the reader would have had to imagine who said what. This post seemed to make sense to me when I started out writing it but as I cant recall exactly what happened I will forgive you for thinking that I have lost it.!!!

Update: Tuesday Storm.

Jill Marc and I went out for a meal last night and it was immediately apparent that the storm on Tuesday had done an awful lot of damage. Everywhere there were torn and twisted branches and some trees had been pulled from their roots. Even over 24 hours later there was still a lot of debris on the roads and all of the loose vegetation was shaken out of the trees above. It is clearly a big reminder that mother earth can be so powerful at times.

and another story here

Refu is one year old today.

I just realised in the last few days that Refu is 1 full year old...I have enjoyed trying to fashion some kind of journal that is hopefully kind of interesting for folks to read and also an informative account of the life and times of refu and an almost daily narrative of what is going on over here. I thank each and every one of you for considering this page to click on in your website surfing, and I have to give a mention to Colm for all the comments along the year. I know that visually the blog has lacked pictures and embedded videos but I am working on making it visually appealing as it was before. Happy birthday Refu.!!!

The story of July 12th, and its relevance today.

story to follow soon....

Fifteen minutes of carnage on normal Tuesday.

Read this page here

Tuesday as I drove home and coming close to the mountain on I-78, there was a very nasty looking storm off in the distance. I never liked thunder and especially lightning and I didnt like to see the lightning strike in a very fast manner. You always think that lightning is far away from where you are but this time I could see it in the near distance. When I got closer to home there was traffic lights out and right by Bushkill park on the road there was a tree down which covered almost the two lanes of the road. Cars were being directed by a police officer and the cars had to verge onto the shoulder and an area where people regularly feed the ducks from the river.
When I did get home Jill told me about how the lightning had hit a garage of a neighbours and it had caught on fire. Also she said that the lightning was hitting so close and it was so loud. Our TV was down and it was only a day later when we learned how much damage the 15 minute storm had produced.

4th of July fireworks on a Saturday in Bethlehem.

4th of July being Wednesday the weather was not kind at all and the rain date was set for Saturday. So in the evening after dinner we set out to get there with time to spare and on the way I had planned to stop by what is called the "cup". The cup is a really old ice cream place that actually started out many many years ago as a shack in the shape of a cup. Of course now its a proper building and as you can imagine, just trying to pick a flavour is an ordeal in itself. I had a nice banana split sundae and the others had a cone. From there it was on to near the south side of Bethlehem, as I suspected many other people had the idea of spending a Saturday evening watching fireworks. We walked down to the bridge and set up our blanket on a grassy embankment under some small trees by the roads verge, right about where we thought the fireworks would be visible from. We were there with much time to spare and waited and waited as people came and congregated and set down to watch the fireworks. The anticipation was building and building until we heard some fireworks off in the distance and we thought "are we in the right place". I was confident that we were in the right place and eventually the display did start. It was quite spectacular and as good as any fireworks display we were lying on our blanket and right above us were the fireworks of every colour. The tree we were under was only very slightly hindering our view of the display but I thought it was very nice to view the extreme colours through the small tree's branches. It was a nice way to spend a saturday evening.

Fourth of July trip to the swimming pool.

Today we were all ready to go to the pool and as we got packed up to go the weather looked very cloudy and cool. When we arrived we were the only ones there. There were four of us and we got the feeling that the employees did not want us to be there as they wanted to go home. The Palmer pool has a policy whereby there must be a minimum of seven people in order for the pool to turn up. So it was very funny to think that we were keeping the pool open and we hoped that others would come to bump up the attendance and it was not long until 2 kids came and we hoped more would come to make the attendance more than the alloted seven. Finally we had been in the water which was a little cool for 30 minutes when they finally announced over the intercom that "due to lack of attendance Palmer pool will be closing in 15 minutes". We swam for a further 10 minutes and got ready to leave. I had been the first into the pool and the last to leave, it was kind of surreal as we left the area on independance day. We had been swimming for around 40 minutes and it was worth it, if only for a few minutes we had got our pool fix.

Independance day today.

Today is the 4th of July and otherwise known as Independance day as on this day over two centuries ago America gained its independance from England and it also means that I have had the day off. It kind of feels like a Saturday or a Sunday as I am back to work tomorrow but the plus side of it all is the fact that I have two days to go umtil the weekend. Happy 4th of July to all of you who it means a lot to.

Ocean City Maryland Day Trip.

In the past few years we have always gone to Ocean City Maryland and have had a great time and have stayed there for at least a long weekend. After deciding to go to Disneyworld in October it was clear that we could not spend so much time or money on other types of holidays, so we arrived upon the compromise of a day trip to OCM. The drive on a good day is always around 4 hours...we have done it before in 3 1/2 hours but typically it takes 4 hours. So on the Sunday after our Camelbeach excursion we set out for OCM and whilst we wanted to leave at around 6am it was actually 45 minutes later when we left. We were making pretty good time when as scheduled we decided to stop half way down for a couple of reasons, firstly to get breakfast as it would be more expensive on the beachfront and secondly so save time as we could get directly onto the beach when we arrived. My brother in law came along also with myself Jill and Marc. We ordered our food and I enjoyed my fruit crepe very much...Jill and Marc and myself were all pretty much finished with our food and we were now waiting for Jack who was really going slow. Keep in mind that our trip was at least 4 hours (x2) and all of this assing around was cutting into our day. It was easily 20 minutes that we had to wait for Jack. When we did get going something I did was to affect the time also. Somehow I took the highway in a northerly direction and it was almost immediately that I realised this however the next exit was 7 miles away. It was a 15 mile round trip just to get back to where we had been and more time wasted!!!

When we did get down to the beach it was a little while till we got parking ten dollars for the whole day. So out onto the beach we went with deck chairs and umbrellas in tow. We spent a few nice hours there and the ocean waves were a lot of fun. After the couple of hours had passes we went to the bath-houses which OCM cahmber of commerce had told us was the place to get freshened up. For 5 dollar each we were given a community type shower and changing area which could only be described as putrid and disgusting with delapidated showers and facilities. At least Jack and Marc and myself had the place to ourselves at the time but Jill not only goT into a row with an nasty old lady attendant but when she did finally get to her ladies changing room there were 3 teenage couples boys and girls just hanging out and from how Jill described it the mens room was seemed so much better.
From there we went out onto the board walk and pier...it had been a reasonably hot day and my brother in law who has to take medication three times a day seemed to be out of it. It was kind of scary as we were responsible for his well being. He had just been with us in the arcade and had played a video game with a large screen and with the heat of the day and just having a feeling that he was not feeling quite right we were worried. It was now around 7pm and I had work the next day Jack was having a seizure event just bad enough to make us quite concerned and we had a 4 hour journey ahead of us. As it turned out we were thinking about staying until around 8pm but as events unfolded us leaving then was going to be the best we could have done. We set back home around 7.10pm and hoped to be home around 11pm or 12pm at worst. The first hour or so was used up in just trying to clear the beach areas where all the other cars and vans were also leaving and there was frequent stop starts as traffic was quite heavy. So in effect the first couple of hours were slow going and when we did get moving everybody was driving like crazy, on one occasion we were alongside a car that had to swerve and brake as the car in front braked suddenly.
When we got to the turn off for I-95 North we noticed a neon sign saying that the highway was going to be closed. We were screwed!. Not knowing where or how to get back on track. We spent some time following some other familiar cars on our journey back and as we followed them in the by now dark evening and it being around 9.30pm and knowing we were easily 3 hours away still from home, it became clear that they were also lost and similarly to us had no idea of how the get back on track. So I had to get on a road and just drive in our general direction north and west to get closer to home. Seemingly lost I had to finbally stop at a gas station and ask for directions. This place was in the middle of nowhere we knew about and as I walked in it was like something out of a scary movie as the characters could have been right out of a movie. As I got in the door to the checkout lady there was a guy in front of me who was asking for her to break a $100 dollar bill and she couldnt or wouldnt. I then asked her for directions and she was unsure so after not getting any good answer...the kind that you feel confident about I walked outside and asked this guy was there having a smoke he was kind of surprised about how far lost I had gotten. After I told him where I had come from and where I wanted to get to and informed him about the highway closure he tolsd me to go back from where I came and take a combination of two roads to get me back onto I-95 North at a higher point in the highway. Well we must have gotten lost about three times and were delirious with tiredness and just wanting to be home already when we seemed to have found I-95 North again, only to find another big traffic jam which was not mioving at all. I took a gamble to take another exit and we ended up in what must have been southeast Philadelphia and eventually an area called Chester which from our times in Philadelphia was a welcome and familiar place name. Our luck had been so bad that we seemed to then catch some good luck and we came back out onto a part of the route home that we knew. We were still some way from home but at least we knew where we were and after another few hours we arrived home so very tired but very happy to be home at around 1.30am in the morning it had been 6 1/2 hours since we left and due to traffic and highway closures it was an extremely long day trip and I was very tired for the rest of the work week. Oh what a day!...trip.