jimsjournal

jimsjournal

Farewell to Summer -- 09/22/09

So, almost two weeks since my last entry. Sorry 'bout that... this has just been an very busy September. Actually, I have been busy with this website... I started this on Geocities (yes, anniversary of that is coming up in just a few days) and when I bought this domain and started doing business with VerveHosting in the summer of 2004, I moved entries from the first half of '04 over to this domain and, eventually I moved my 20th century entries (wow, doesn't that sound odd!) over as well, but that still left 2000 thru 2003 parked on Geocities. It was going to be something I would get around to eventually.... But now I have really had to go through those entries and edit them to change addresses from Geocities to www.jimsjounal.com because Geocities is going away at the end of this month. Thus, time that might have been used to write new entries has, instead, been used to migrate old entries. I've got about twenty months worth of entries to finish converting -- plus the calendar-year pages that point to them. (I'm not going to lose anything when Geocities goes dark -- I have everything on my hard drive; I just have to convert the internal previous and next links and things like that.)

The last summer sunrise of 2009:

A few minutes before sunrise this morning, the last day of summer

A weekend in Binghamton:

As many of you know, Nancy and I moved to Rhode Island from Binghamton, NY. We've rarely been back there since then -- and each of those times has been related to marriage. The first time was when friends celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. (She had been a colleague of Nancy's at Link Flight Simulation.) In the summer of 2001 we were in the Ithaca area for Adam and Leah's wedding. (We passed through Binghamton but did not visit.) Then, a few years later, another friend got married on New Year's Eve in Owego, New York (a town about midway between Ithaca and Binghamton).

Now, a decade has passed since their 50th wedding anniversary and that young couple pictured on the right celebrated their 60th anniversary and Nancy and I drove over to Binghamton to join in the festivities.

Lorette and Pete in 1949

They give me hope that we'll get to celebrate some of those high-numbered anniversaries (especially since we made it to thirty this year). Pete was 31 when they married, just five years younger than I was when Nancy and I were married. Lorette is three years younger than Pete. (She bought a new car this year.)

While in Binghamton we went by the Binghamton University campus to visit with our niece Kaitlyn. She showed us around the campus -- they have added a lot of new buildings over the fourteen years since we left. (We had both spent a lot of time there -- I had been a grad student in the English doctoral program before ~~escaping~~ dropping out and later got an M.S. in Systems Science but Nancy has three degrees from there: her undergraduate degree in mathematics, her M.S. in Systems Science, and her M.A. in Education.)

Nancy even got to fulfill her nostalgic desire to eat in a dining hall. The picture is of Nancy and Kait in a new dining hall (I don't even remember its name) high up a hillside looking down at the main part of the campus. (Kait told us that the cafeteria trays are popular for use as improvised sleds when the hillside is snow-covered during Binghamton's six and a half months of winter.)

That was a week and a half ago. This past weekend we were busy at home. Saturday night we had Nancy's mother plus her sister Janet and her husband Tom and her sister Clara and her husband Paul (Kaitlyn's parents) over for dinner. Our trip to Binghamton inspired me to make chicken spiedies for dinner (using Salamida's State Fair Spiedie Sauce)... I also made a pot of butternut squash soup. That was the first time I had used a blender since the kids were little (I used to make our own baby food). Sunday Jill and I went up to Providence to run in the CVS Downtown 5k. That race keeps getting bigger every year. This year there were more than five thousand people (counting walkers) in the 5k. (If you add up all of the kids who run in the three hours of kids races they have all morning plus all of the high school kids who run in the teenage 3k run -- I swear they must draw every cross-country team in the state -- there was a total of more than ten thousand runners.) Then we came home and I put in hours of yard work, including about an hour and a half of splitting wood.

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