Foggy Morning

Foggy Morning

This photo is a direct. So instead of waiting for the sunny part of the day to go for my walk, I opted to go out early this morning and walk in the thirty-degree foggy weather. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get it right.

Looking Forward To The Weekend

This photo is a misdirect. The mornings around here have not looked like this for a while. I took this last week. Since then it has been raining pretty much all the time. Tomorrow and for the next six days we are supposed to be sunny. Might take some post office pictures this weekend.

My Own “Vintage” Postcards

Along with the money in that honeymoon album, there were several postcards purchased as souvenirs. The first ones I bought were of the Tokyo Tower, as our first stop on the trip was Japan. I don’t know why I bought so many of them. Maybe they were on sale, or maybe I was just thrilled to be there.


Of the 5 countries we visited, I only have postcards from three of them. The other two are just singular cards that came from the Philippines and Taiwan. Jeepneys were just the way to get around cities. They were born post World War II from the Jeeps the Allies left behind. Driving into Taipei from the airport, we saw this large ornate building off in the distance, but as it turned out, it was our hotel.

Money, Money, Money

In the scrapbook of our 1978, 5-country, honeymoon trip there were, from each country, a laminated page of spare change and sometimes paper money we picked up in each place. They weren’t professionally done, just two sheets of clear plastic stuck together. All the raised edges of every coin had some sort of green goo. This is probably from a chemical reaction between the metal and glue. All of the bills were impossible to separate from their plastic cocoons, except some of the bills from Taiwan. The ones that survived were the ones that were stuck between 2 other bills, so they stuck to nothing.

I don’t have the inclination to clean all the coins. But they might be worth something, as they are all from the 70s, and there are even some coins from Hong Kong while it was still under British rule. The bills from Taiwan are in yuan, and now their currency is in Taiwan dollars. Maybe I could take them to a coin dealer and see if there might be interest in buying any of this stuff.

Wild Blue Yonder

Another day and another photo album gone through. This one was a mix of things: photos and souvenirs of our 17-day honeymoon trip to Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong & Manila. Also some photos from our visits to Saipan and some random Guam photos, including a couple of airplane photos. But the two really nice photos weren’t mine. One shows two EA-3Bs flying in formation; the other is looking through a cockpit window of a third. I’m speculating that they were done by the VQ-1 squadron photographer. The prints were slightly fading, but endured living inside a photo album from 1978 a lot better than my snapshots.

Hi Mom!

I went through a couple more photo albums today. These were from the 1980-82 era. A lot of visiting family on three coasts: northeast, south, and northwest. Not many saveable photos; just scanned about five. There were a couple visits to national parks, one that I thought I had visited and one that I don’t remember visiting.

After visiting Carlsbad Caverns, I wondered just how many of our national parks I had visited. I came up with 18 of the 63, with 3 being questionable. The Everglades was a question until the second photo album from Florida vacations, where there were 20 or so bad photos of swamps and an alligator under the title card reading Everglades. The one park I didn’t remember was Mt. Rainier in Washington State. Must have been on a visit to big brother Jim’s place. So as it stands, it’s nineteen, with two of them being questionable, but I’m almost positive about Acadia in Maine.

The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is iffy. I know I never went up in it, but I’m kinda sure there is a photo I took of the Arch. I do remember St. Louis is where our practically new 1974 Honda Accord’s clutch went out. It was towed to the local Honda dealer, and after hearing our story, they stuck us in next, and we were back on the road in a couple of hours.

Mom at the Meadowlands

But the surprise find was one of my mother. It was taken by a Polaroid camera, and I never owned one. She’s sitting in a booth in the Meadowlands cutting up a cake. Was it her birthday? Was it her last day working at the restaurant? I’m not sure this would be in the early 80s and how did I get it?

Thirty Years Ago…

It was a totally lost weekend. I was out once on Saturday to get my latte and walk all of half a mile before returning home to park on the couch. Sunday I didn’t even make it out once. Mostly on the couch with some seat time in front of the PC. There was a lot of Olympics, scrolling to find something to watch, and sometimes actually watching a movie.

Today I got up, rode the bike for 30 minutes, finished a jigsaw puzzle, picked up the latte, and walked for about a mile. At the end a guy came up and asked how I liked the GTI. He had a Golf R (the high-zoot version), but when it was totaled, he replaced it with a Hyundai Ioniq 5N. We chatted about wrapped cars and other things before heading in opposite directions. I did a little retail therapy and bought a couple new jigsaw puzzles.

I went through two different old-school photo albums, and it is amazing how few pictures were worth saving. Ended up scanning in only 3 pictures from 1993 +/- a year.