Dave's Journal / May2025
First visit (two days ago) of the year. Lots of work going on .... drain pipes / plumbing around the barns. Didn't see any sheep today. Not many people. Nice day. Good to get out there.
Water level in the beaver pond is way up. All the nice little piers with benches are partially submerged and closed off.
My Notes: dupe layer / GMIC / pencil portrait / #404040 / mode=dissolve / opacity = 25%
Hey you know who this guy looks like ..... no ..... can't be ....but yeh it sure looks like ....really ..... it looks like Jack !!! holding hands with a movie star !!!!
One thing led to another and we are talking to 3 roofers about .... well .... a new roof.
Meetings have ranged from
[A] (literally) 2 minutes in the driveway to
[B] 2½ HOURS on the porch looking at slides and Powerpoints to
[C] actually zero face time (he left glossy picture brochures on my porch and sent me an email).
Prices range from $11,000 to $38,000.
Those are not all the facts but they are all true facts.
Happily, one of these guys comes very highly recommended by a good engineering buddy of mine, and their price is very reasonable. We are "talking" by email.
The dogwood? crabapple? tree out front blooms flowers for 5 days / year.
This is day 3.
Back in the day, smoking cigarettes was a Hollywood symbol of coolness, elegance and sophistication. And the magazine ads (there was no TV back then) reflected this. Very stylish.
I found a large webpage of these ads the Internet Archive, along with countless gazillions of other pictures, videos, books, audio files ....etc etc.
That archive is kind of overwhelming (there are terabytes and terabytes of things in there) but if you have some time to kill, take a look.
A few days back I spent some time downloading 1940s -50s "film noir" movies off the Internet Archive. (This is legal as these are now public domain movies.) The files are small (<1GB) and nice to watch on your tablet when out of the house and bored.
I got:
OK ..... Back to the golden age of cigarettes:
I started smoking at 16 and pretty much quit at 19. Camels (unfiltered and pretty harsh). I started at one pack / day (20 cigs) and was up to two packs 40 cigs/day!!! before I (kind of) quit at 19.
I was seriously addicted. I'd light one up in the morning even before I sat up in bed. And once I even brought a pack back to the store and told the guy the pack was stale and had him give me a fresh pack.
They were around 25¢ / pack at that point (1964). Today they are about $14 / pack !!!
I won't comment on our useless, lazy neighbor - if I did you might think he is useless and lazy. Actually .... let's drop it.
So here I am trimming his trees (those saplings are oaks that will be 50ft tall some day) and bushes as the hang into my driveway. I try to be positive about it and think "well the exercise will do me good", but really I'd rather be watching Youtube videos while slugging down a beer.
Report from VA .....
Loretta is chillin' at a stop overlooking the Blue Ridge Mts.
Well ..... I reloaded my entire "CafePhotos" webpage, just for posterity. Go to davesjournal and click the link there to "CafePhotos" - be warned, there's lots of photo stuff on that webpage.
A very long way from the house we knew.
In 1945, Mom lived in this building with her parents and, in February, she walked to the hospital to give birth to me (Dad was in the army in Europe)!!
The small building is set far back from the street, and is a "single family house" on a street of multiple family brownstones. It was once (100 years ago) a shed for an undertaker's horse and carriage. He rented out the upstairs rooms to my Italian immigrant gandparents. It's been re-renovated several times since .... the neighborhood went gentrified in recent times, and I think the current market value is close to $6M.
(Thank you, Cousin Pete, for the real estate link to these pictures . . . and the reminder of better times, though we were so $$$ poor !!!)
Early every morning ("early" is argumentative) I watch some sort of Youtube travel / tourist video which is nice because I will never actually get to these places. Today, I rode a steam train out west somewhere, grabbed a fisheye lens and shot the TV screen for fun.
Bet you never watched a pig eat a watermelon .... look at that tail wagging !!
