Hacked Again

Sun Dec 7, 2014Generalrksmith

And, of course, the hack happened just before the backup on Saturday morning which was the combined daily / weekly / monthly backup. The site should be back in working order once again. All the passwords changed, once again. And, this time, I’ve made all the program files un-writeable, which means that any upgrades takes a LOT of work. I’ve no idea how the hack is happening, but maybe the site is a little better protected.

Where in the World?

Fri Dec 5, 2014Generalrksmith

Hopewell Cultural National Cultural Park — Hopewell Cultural National Historical Park

We’re back in Pennsylvania … Downingtown, Pennsylvania to be precise. Our son Daryl, his wife Laura, and their daughter and our granddaughter Lilly are the next stop on our Grand American Tour. We arrived here late Thursday evening, December 4, 2014 (Happy Birthday, Jim (December 4) and Happy Birthday, Laura (December 3)) after an eight-hour drive from Pickerington, Ohio.

We had a very nice visit with Jim and family in Union, Kentucky. It was a great place to spend Thanksgiving, get our laundry done, do some shopping, and do a whole lot of visiting and talking. Jim plays a binary game of Scrabble. He thoroughly trounced everyone in the first game and then came in last (by a lot) on the second game. He serves on the High Council in his Stake and is assigned to a small branch south of Union. I went with him to the meetings at the Branch on Sunday morning and then we went to his home Ward on Sunday afternoon … except that Jim had to take his son Steven to the emergency room where Steven was completely mis-diagnosed as having a canker sore in his upper lip rather than what really was a raging infection caused by getting “stabbed” by the dental hygienist while getting his teeth cleaned earlier in the week. That was the only excitement for the week…. but was more than enough.

On Monday, December 1st, we left Union and meandered along southern Ohio. We drove down along the Ohio River then up to some Indian mound locations (hence the picture at the top of the page). While driving along we came across a very unusual driveway … at least unusual for us. It turns out there were a number of places along this river with very similar driveways! Why go to the expense of a bridge??

http://youtu.be/-ux4m7AxRaY

We spent the night in a nice little campground near Frankfort, Ohio. They have a few sites open year around. They are very nice people, run a great operation, and I highly recommend them. HOWEVER, be careful when using a GPS to get there! Their website says:

For those of you with GPS please note, Hwy 28 to South Musselman will lead to a dead end road. The bridge that connects North Musselman and South Musselman has been out for 30 years but the maps have not been updated to reflect that change. County Road 550 is the only road to cross North Musselman Station Road.

Of course, I didn’t read the directions … just entered the address into our TomTom GPS unit (known for getting us almost all the way there). Nina was driving and as we went down, down, down on a very sketchy road, we came to a “Road Closed Ahead” sign. There was a small area where we could turn around. When we got back up out of the valley and had cell phone signal again, Google gave us much better directions.

As an aside, the GPS manufacturers such as Magellan, Garmin, TomTom, etc., need to take a page from Google’s book. Our TomTom first asks for the state, then the city, then the road, and finally, the number. It doesn’t let us enter things like “North Musselman Station Road”, only “Musselman Station Road”. Directions like north, east, south, and west can’t be entered for the street name. Google, on the other hand, has you enter the entire address at one time: “2466 N. Musselman Station Road, Frankfort Ohio” and then parses the address into the correct elements. That’s a Much Nicer User Experience!

On Tuesday we stopped at a couple more Indian mound locations including the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Chillicothe, Ohio. That was a fascinating visit. We now have books and info to learn more.

We arrived at Nina’s brother Ralph’s home about dark on Tuesday to a delicious lasagne dinner. We parked the motor home in their driveway and spent two nights and Wednesday with them. We went to a huge antique mall where, after two hours, I’d only been through maybe half of the store and then went to the North Market. During the summer this is apparently a huge farmers market. During the winter a number of vendors are doing business indoors. I bought some very nice chocolate from a Belgian chocolatier. I now wish I had bought twice as much!

The weather has been quite cooperative for December. It’s been cold … but we’ve avoided the snow (for the most part) and have enjoyed a few sunny days. The Pennsylvania Turnpike is not a fun road to drive even in the best of weather. I’m very thankful for the great weather we’ve enjoyed.

Life is very good!

Meanwhile, more pictures. Here are some of the covered bridges in Ashtabula County we visited:

A Happy and Thankful Thanksgiving

Thu Nov 27, 2014Generalrksmith

We arrived in Union, Kentucky late yesterday afternoon. We left North Branford Tuesday morning and drove through New York, New Jersey, and into Pennsylvania before stopping for the night in Washington, PA, south of Pittsburgh. We stayed at a nice KOA campground where full hookups were available. While it was cold, there was no precipitation during the night. The campground was fairly quiet, just freeway noise from I-79.

We were on our way by 9 am and arrived at Jim’s house right at 4 pm. We drove through serious snow for the first hour or so. The rest of the trip was very uneventful.

We’ve had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner, played some games, enjoyed a fire in the fireplace, and getting ready for bed.

Life is good!

A Few Pictures from Our Visit to Chardon, Ohio

We bought this house when we returned to the United States in 1976 from our assignment in Germany. The house was almost finished when we bought it, so we stayed in an Howard Johnson motel for a few weeks while waiting for the occupancy permit to be issued. We sold the house in 1989 when we moved to Pleasant View, Utah.

The people who bought the house in 1989 have lived there since and the woman is now a widow. The trees and foliage have just about consumed the house. The driveway is like it was … with the bend in the driveway just as bad as it always was. This is the house where our kids all grew up.

We went out to eat twice with Pam and Ed. This one was at the Red Robin restaurant in Willougby, Ohio for lunch. The snow had started and by evening we had plenty of snow to contend with on the drive home.

Ed and his buddies get together each Tuesday evening to practice for a couple of hours. Nina, Pam, and I had spent the day visiting the covered bridges in Ashtabula County and got back to Pam’s house just in time for the boys to start practicing. The next two and a half hours were just absolutely delightful. Ed has an amazing talent!

We lived about 13 years in Chardon and the downtown area was an important part of Chardon life. In the 1830’s, Kirtland was part of Geauga County where Chardon was the county seat. As a result, Joseph Smith went often (particularly in 1838 and 1839) to Chardon for various court appearances. The Ohio Legislature created a new county called Lake County in 1840 to separate the Mormons from the rest of northeastern Ohio. By that time, the Mormons had left the area for Missouri and Illinois.

The Geauga County Courthouse sits on the eastern side of the central park in Chardon.

The gazebo on the green is a favorite spot for weddings and many other community events. We would come up to the green in the summer for band concerts in the gazebo. Ed and his band plays occasionally in the gazebo or elsewhere on the green during the summer.

About 4″ of snow had fallen when we drove around the square taking pictures. By the next morning close to a foot of snow was on the ground. Chardon gets a lot of snow, particularly lake effect snow from Lake Erie.

The Park Auditorium and School was an elementary school and the only school auditorium when we lived in Chardon. Since then it looks like a nice auditorium has been built at the high school. All of our children performed in plays, musicals, recitals, and other events in this auditorium.

James, Heather, and Dawnmarie all graduated from Chardon High School. We moved to Pleasant View, Utah when Trevor was a senior. He attended all but his final semester in Chardon but graduated from Weber High in Pleasant View, Utah.

We left Chardon, heading towards Albany, New York on Saturday, November 15th. The big lake-effect storm was underway. This was the storm that dropped six feet of snow in the Buffalo, New York area. We had nine inches of snow that required me to climb up on the roof and remove the snow so that we could close the slide-out. With that, we said goodbye to Pam and drove off. We stopped to get gas at the freeway entrance at I-80 and Ohio Route 44 … and Pam showed up to say one last goodbye!

Pictures From Indiana

We lived for a couple of years in Otterbein, Indiana, so for purposes of documenting life story, we stopped and took a few pictures.

The church is across the street from the grade school on the corner of Church and Oxford street. The building and surrounding area has not changed at all.

Our oldest son Jim walked from home to first grade in this school. It looks pretty much the same!

I hadn’t remembered the school’s mascot … the “Red Devils”. I think this is an appropriate name for grade-school-aged children! Jim attended the first grade at this school. We moved to Mentor On the Lake, Ohio where he attended second grade.

The house we owned way back then is on the right and the field across the street from the house is on the left. A new church has been built in that field. During the couple of years we lived there, crops in the field alternated between corn and soy beans.

We bought the house because house payments were cheaper than paying rent, we could buy for nothing down on a VA loan, and we could get a few extra dollars each month while going to school to help pay the mortgage. We bought the house for $12,000 and sold it for $12,000 a couple of years later when we were transferred to Cleveland, Ohio. All in all, we saved a little bit and learned a lot about owning a house!

The house has since gotten new aluminum siding and looks quite a bit better than when we owned it! In addition, there used to be a window on this side of the house upstairs. A bat flew in the open window one night. Getting the bat out of the house was a memorable event!

The lot was 1/3 acre and the first couple of times mowing the lawn with a manual push mower convinced us to buy a power mower. We had a nice garden along with some excellent tomatoes. The city was building a municipal sewer system, but that hadn’t reached our part of town. The septic system was under the grass to the south side of the house. The septic system had lots of problems and needed pumping out about every six months.

Another significant change to the house was replacing the screened-in porch with a new porch. We used to enjoy sitting in on the porch watching the thunderstorms that occurred regularly during July and August. Some of the lightning shows were very spectacular.

We moved to West Lafayette, Indiana after getting out of the Air Force in the fall of 1968. I was attending Purdue University. We arrived just as the school year was starting and apartments were difficult to find. We ended up with a six-month lease in an apartment in this apartment complex. The Church was within walking distance (the building has since been sold and a new building erected). Purdue, however, was quite a distance away so Nina usually drove me to school. I was working midnights at Purdue National Bank, going to school in the mornings, and trying to get some sleep in the evenings. The whole combination didn’t work very well.

We then rented an apartment on Wood Street in West Lafayette. It was within walking distance of Purdue so the transportation issues became much easier. The house has been torn down as Purdue expanded into that neighborhood. From Wood Street we bought a house in Otterbein, Indiana.

The Indiana Veterans Home was a short distance from our first apartment in West Lafayette, Indiana. Nina’s father George spent the last couple of years of his life in the veterans home. He had been an officer in the Navy during World War II. He had moved to Indiana while we were living in Otterbein, met a delightful woman, married her, and spent the rest of his life in Lafayette / West Lafayette, Indiana.

Catch Up on Pictures … A Photo Gallery

This was the first of several snow storms we have driven through on the trip. We were driving from Laramie towards Cheyenne when the snow started to fall.

This campground has the significant attribute of being next to a Very Busy Railroad. Trains and whistles all night long … with no breaks, it seems.

This campground had new owners who were busy making a number of renovations. A big plus for this place are the swings at every camp site. Definitely worth the stop.

We stopped for gas and saw a Dairy Queen across the highway. It was time for ice cream! Problem: the DQ was closed for the season. While turning around we saw this old car for sale. Nina had me take her picture (on her phone) beside the car.

We stopped at Carl Sandburg’s birthplace in Galesburg, Illinois. On a previous trip to South Carolina we stopped at the house he lived in later years and where he died, so it seemed fitting to fill in the gap and stop at his birthplace.

This is the back yard of the house where Carl Sandburg was born. His ashes are interred under the rock at the back of the yard.

As we drove into Peoria, we weren’t planning on stopping. We were going to drive further south to Springfield, Illinois to visit some Abraham Lincoln sites. However, there was an accident on the I-474 freeway (a truck hauling a wind turbine rolled over causing some injuries) so I decided to continue into Peoria. Then we saw a sign for the “Caterpillar Visitor’s Center” and decided to stop and see some of their big machines. The visitor’s center was a lot of fun and very informative.

As we drove away, however, somethings (plural) were wrong. There was an unusual sound in the front end and a tire was thumping in the rear. We went to a tire shop who couldn’t work on vehicles of our size and sent us up the street. The Bridgestone store found we had a flat inner tire on the passenger side as well as a missing bushing for the tie rod on the passenger front tire. They were able to fix both and get us back on the road in a couple of hours.

We were able to miss the major lake-effect snow fall that buried western New York State. We drove the “Southern Tier Expressway” through Elmira, Corning, and Binghampton eventually ending up in Glenmont, NY, a suburb of Albany. There was some snow along our route, but we had a nice day for driving.

Nina prefers to drive and I like to watch everything going on around us.

Life is great!

Visiting Family in Connecticut

Fri Nov 21, 2014Generalrksmith

We have arrived at our next significant stop on this Great American Road Trip … North Branford, Connecticut, home of Nina’s cousins Linda and Chris. Our motor home is parked in their driveway and we’re sleeping indoors in one of the bedrooms affectionately named “The Honeymoon Suite”. It’s a nice, warm queen-sized bed and we’re sleeping very well.

Both Linda and Chris work the afternoon shift. However, Linda has had yesterday and today off from work and Chris will have tomorrow and Sunday off from work so we’ll get a lot of time with each of them during our visit. Yesterday we did some shopping and local sightseeing. Today we drove down the coast towards New York followed by a brief visit to Chris at her work.

In addition to visiting and sightseeing, Nina is also copying a whole bunch of family history information. She’s set up in the dining area with the scanner and her computer scanning in pictures and lots of other information. There is quite a treasure trove of information here!

Tomorrow we’ll make our way over to visit with Peter and Maureen. On Monday we hope to get into New York to see Sister Kendra Baker, our granddaughter missionary. Nina visited with her mission president today who gave us permission to spend some time with her on Monday. That should be a fun visit!

Along to way today, I saw a box on a fence at a larger intersection. We stopped to see that it was a “Little Free Library” (see littlefreelibrary.org). It was worthy of a picture! Quite a few books in the box.

Chris works at a call center which does solicitations for various organizations. We stopped in at her work area just before her shift started to say hello and see where she works. She’s a supervisor at the company and was surprised to see us. We had a short but delightful visit.

It is definitely Very Chilly here in Connecticut. However, life is very good!

Sightseeing In and Around Albany … and Ice Cream!

Tue Nov 18, 2014Generalrksmith

This is our last day visiting with Nina’s cousin Priscilla. We’ll leave tomorrow morning to move a little bit further east from the winter storm going on to the west of us. The weather turns back warm this coming weekend. It can’t happen soon enough for me!

We had another laid-back day. A leisurely breakfast, showers, and such. We left about 11:30 am and headed north to meet Priscilla’s daughter for lunch. Then we took a short tour of the Capitol area in Albany then headed way south to an octagonal barn that Nina had seen the last time (a 13-sided barn) when she and her sister Pam were here. Then back near our starting point for ice cream. Nina had a bowl of strawberry ice cream topped with chocolate chips and I had a bowl vanilla ice cream with hot fudge. Very nice. The ice cream shop was definitely “old school” and the picture above is the inside of the shop.

Now we’re watching some TV and relaxing. Later we’ll be getting the motor home ready to roll.

Life continues to be great!

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