Cub Hill House in Maryland

This is a front view of our old house (built in 1740) in Maryland.  It's called The Cub Hill house and the neighborhood around it is called Cub Hill. 

    There are 2 acres of land attached to this house, the remains of acres and acres of the original farmland that was sold off for development. That's when my husband's parents bought the house and the 2 acres. The house was a wreck and they spent a long time making it habitable, living in it all the while. They couldn't afford to buy the other acre and a half where the barn was located, so another person bought that. The property was overgrown and his parents bought several goats (male goats are very stinky) to chomp on the underbrush until they finally had space for a lawn. Parts still are wooded area, but there is a large front and back lawn. 

Another part is where there was a quarter acre garden that I planted and took care of and canned the produce. We moved in (with two children) to help his older parents take care of the place because it was getting to be too much for them. Then we inherited it. But we were both working full time, so no more garden. 

This is the front of the house which used to face Old Harford Road (when it was called The Harford Road, but over the years the road has moved away from the house and now runs along side it. Because of that, we never used the front entrance, just one of the three back entrances to access the back yard and the car parking area. 

When my husband died, I knew my granddaughter and I couldn't keep it up ourselves. (it was a huge job to shovel out to the road during snowstorms) So I sold the place and moved to California where my children are now living. (yay - no more snow) 

Remembering the 1960 sit ins, and how things were still bad in 1968

 I went to grad school in Kentucky at UK in 1967-8. I worked part time at a downtown department store and often grabbed a bite of lunch at the lunch counter nearby. By that time it was way after the 1960 sit-ins and everyone was supposed to be served at lunch counters by then. Well, I sat down next to an elderly black guy and the waitress soon came over to take my order. I had noticed that the guy beside me had been trying to get her attention for some time to make his order, so I told her that I'd wait/ he was first. It wasn't until later that I realized that she had been ignoring him but was serving white people only. She probably took one look at "college girl with long hair probably a hippie" and realized that I was serious when I refused to let her serve me first.

Beach Day - Florida v. the east coast

We would drive down from Maryland to the Florida Panhandle to visit my parents during our children's Thanksgiving Vacation time. 

When we went swimming in the (warm to us) Gulf on one of the Florida Panhandle beaches reserved for the Air Force (permission granted by my brother), some 'official' looking guys drove us and yelled at us, "What do you think you're doing?" We shouted back, "Swimming." They simply shook their heads and drove off and we continued with our beach day. (we were the only people there) 

It wasn't until we visited them one August that we realized why those men were worried about us. The water was bathtub Warm! At Thanksgiving time, the water in Florida seemed normal to us because it was the temperature of ocean water off the coast of New Jersey and Maryland during the summer. 

Your place in space

 Do you get lost easily? I hardly do. (but when I do I get really discombobulated) I usually know when I'm going north or south (north is up. I actually feel that I'm going up when I go north and definitely feel I'm going down when I go South). 

I also have precise visual spacing. (when my husband packed the car for a trip there was stuff left outside the car that he couldn't figure out where to put. So I'd pull everything out and then everything fit. Not only that, but the kid's car busywork and toys were on top and the snacks were accessible.)  

My second child had no sense of direction. She'd call me late at night saying she somehow found herself in Pennsylvania and couldn't find her way home. So I'd pull out a map and direct her.  

My husband would ask - how much further to go. So I'd say = about one inch. He had no idea what one inch on the map meant time wise. On long trips we would trade driving responsibilities. Once when we were on a trip, he directed me to drive across a bridge INTO the next state. No we weren't supposed to go that direction. From then on he preferred to drive and let me do the directing. (Let's not talk about the time I was the one who accidentally got us headed across the Hudson river into New York City. No, we didn't want to go into the city. We were headed home and he should have taken the second exit (to the west) instead of the first exit (to the east) that got us to a bridge toll station. This confusion must happen all the time at that spot because they actually had a turn-around there so we could get going into the correct direction.

The worst boss I ever had

During a discussion of 'the worst bosses you've ever had' this was my contribution: 

We had a branch manager who was soooo unqualified. All of us had college degrees and some of us had master's degrees, but she treated us as if we were college students working part time for her. (she came from being in charge of a situation like that in a college library) She'd sit in her office all the time and assign long hours on the information desk to us. But we had a lot of background work we needed to do, some out in the library book stacks and some back in our own office. So I began working an hour or so after my 8 hours, just to catch up the back office work. Guess what - then she simply assigned me to work those overtime hours on the information desk "as long as I was staying late." grrrrr. But she wouldn't let me take time off for all the overtime she assigned me.  My overtime hours grew and grew. We were not paid for overtime, but legally we were supposed to take an equal amount of time off.

She never did figure out why we kept going into the book stacks to handle the books, deciding which books needed to be weeded and tossed or replaced. No, she thought we should be at the information desk all the time. (but that she never needed to do that or to work handling the books)

We never knew our working hours - day shift or 12 to 8 shift - from week to week. Eventually she admitted she drank a six pack of beer while writing out the desk schedules and weekly schedule. (it showed)  

Several people gave up and quit and found other places to work. Even I was searching for another place. Individual complaints to administration didn't work; she was able to convince admin that it was we who were bad workers.  

Finally a coworker and I got together, made a list and made a presentation to admin of all the things she did and didn't do. (One of the administrators finally had to accept that something was wrong - with the branch manager - which was hard because she was the administrator who had chosen this branch manager to work for the library system.)  

So, she was transferred out and we got a competent branch manager. I think I was the only librarian left out of the librarian staff by that time; everyone else had found new jobs. At that point I hadn't yet accepted the alternate job I had been offered. News note -- she was transferred to a larger branch, not as branch manager. However they did give her the job of creating the work schedules and boy did they learn quickly how rotten she was at that.  

Yes, she was fired. Good!

I like cats, not dogs

 Our family had both dogs and cats.  I just wish dogs weren't so smelly.  A lot of my family have a poor sense of smell and therefore don't mind smelly dogs, picking up their smelly poop, or mucking out the horse's stall.

Not for me, sorry.  Just give me a purring cat who is constantly cleaning grooming herself.

And what's with this female dog's mensuration all over the furniture? What a mess.  Cats don't have that. 

By now you've probably guessed who was in charge of the dogs in our family and who was in charge of the cats. 

NO LICK, dog!  No lick.  (our dogs learned to greet me with a big sloppy lick -- 6 inches away from my body.  Thank you, dog.  Nice dog.)

Four year old boy proposes marriage to hundreds

 My brother, when he was four, proposed marriage to over a hundred females, beginning with his mother and sisters. Including Grace Kelly. (she accepted as did most of the others)  

When Grace Kelly married the prince of Monaco, our father teased the now teen aged boy that he should sue for breach of promise. 　

How did we know Grace Kelly? We rented a house in Stone Harbor, NJ for two weeks, played with Grace Kelly's nieces and often said 'Hi' to her as we cut through her family's yard to get to the beach every day. My brother was a charmer then - and is a charmer today.