September 21, 1995
Well lets see, trying to write at 4:40am is quite a chore. Yesterday Mom and Dad came over so that Dad could rebuild the doors in the kitchen. This was a simple chore that Ruth Anne wanted me to do. They got here around noon and didn’t leave till around 8:30pm and still wasn’t complete. Dad is really a master carpenter and likes to do things right. He still will have to come back next week to finish the job. Yesterday Ruth Anne called and arranged with Rabbi Glazer the reaffirming ceremony for the folks at the 50th Anniversary party on November 5th. He said that we should buy a Katuba and he would fill it out with the original dates on it for them. She also talked with Shir Delite, the band she hired for the occasion. After negotiating with them, we now have a five piece band including a 75 year old trombone player that played in the Army band during WWII. He was the one that located the song that was Momma favorite song during the war.

September 14, 1995
Boy it sure has been a long time since I made an entry and a lot has happened. Ruth Anne slipped and fell heavily in one of the corridors at the Pentagon. She spent most of the day in the Army clinic at the Pentagon. She still is hurting but it seems to be getting less debilitating. Last weekend we went to Virginia Beach to attend cousin Stephanie Greenhouse’s wedding. Her new name is Stephanie Buckberg and her husband is Perry. Just before we went down, we learned that my nephew, Jacob Schindler was admitted to Virginia Beach General Hospital suffering from some new disease causing inflammation of the Brain. The week before he was about to be fired from his job as a bank teller, because he was coming up short in his cash drawer. He decided to resign instead so that he would have an easier time getting a new job. The reason for his problems at work were the Brain disease. Gary Siegel, one of Ruth Anne’s first cousins, an Internist, is one of the doctors on Jacob’s case. Jacob was supposed to have part of his skull opened up so that they could take a biopsy of the tissue that surrounds the brain. That was last Tuesday. We haven’t heard anything since then.

I finally got all the invitations to both Jack Van De Riet’s (little Jack) Bar Mitzvah and my in-laws Bernice and Jerry Massey’s 50th wedding anniversary finished and in the mail on Sunday night. Today, Thursday, we got the first response back from Norma Jean Ornoff Waranch. We and Momma have been getting a steady stream of calls on how nice the invitations look. Momma (Bernice) hasn’t seen the invitations yet as we were trying to keep the whole thing a secret from her. She now knows most of what is planned, but we still haven’t told her of the Klezmer Band that Ruth Anne has hired and the photos we plan to display of their early years together.

We rode down to Richmond last night to see Eric. Ruth Anne drove because I was so exhausted from being at work all day. She did great even though she isn’t used to driving that great a distance. Ruth Anne got a really good deal on a sport coat, for Eric, at Peebles Department Store here in North Stafford. Because of his rotations in the Hospital, last night was the only time we could see him. October 1, he starts his surgery rotation for six weeks. He is hoping that he can arrange to be off the weekend of Little Jack’s Bar Mitzvah and his Bubbee and Zadee’s (Grandma and Grandpa) 50th Wedding Anniversary.

August 24, 1995 (10:16pm)
When we drove up the driveway when we got home I noticed that three of my crow friends had stopped by for an afternoon snack on the sunflower seeds I had left for them in the back yard.
With all the noise of closing doors on the car, you would think it would scare the crows away, but they didn’t mind a bit and continued their snack.

I guess I shouldn’t eat Ruth Anne’s candy as it gives me Hershey Squirts. I have been loose all evening, terrible subject. This evening I set my sights on printing the envelopes for the Jack’s Bar Mitzvah and Dad and Momma’s 50th wedding anniversary. When I got home from work I just passed out for a couple of hours. While Ruth Anne was at water aerobics I started printing the envelopes. I guess Ruth Anne should have eaten before she went to aerobics as she got sick and had to come home early. I talked on the telephone with Hedy Lynn, Aunt Pearl, Mom and Dad, and Harriet this evening about the invitations. Hedy Lynn has been calling Becky ever night since she left home for college in Greensboro NC. When Ozzie gets a peak of the phone bill he is going to go ballistic. After the first phone bill, she probably will slow down to the Internet via American On Line. Aunt Pearl said if the medication doesn’t work the doctor’s will have to put a Pacemaker in. Tomorrow Aunt Pearl’s daughter Mary and her kids will be leaving Virginia Beach for home in Monsey NY via Momma’s and Daddy’s for lunch. We plan to be there to pick up more supplies for the invitation mailing and to see them as well.

August 23, 1995 (5:43pm)
This morning I got up at 7:30am and went out and put in my makeshift bird bath made from sheet plastic. As previously stated, I used a depression in an excavation site for the sheet plastic to reside. I filled the bird bath with approximately two inches of water. About an hour later it needed refilling. The birds and especially the squirrels were seen in the makeshift bath.

I took the day off to go to my wife Ruth Anne’s Secretary of the Navy (SECNAV) office picnic.
Before we had to go, I managed some time to call Micron Computer Company for technical assistance to correct my computer’s graphic shortcomings. They were able to help and I fixed it. It sure looks great now. We left for the picnic about 11:20am this morning and went to Quantico Marine Corp Base a distance of seven miles. We got to Lungo Reservoir at 11:35am and walked around the area for a while. Ruth Anne decided she wanted to go pedal boating on the Lake. The boats were on the end of a rickety wooden pier about four feet above the water. One of the SECNAV staff that was assign to help with the boats gave Ruth Anne assistance getting into the boat. We sat side by side separated by a fiberglass hump. The mechanism to move the craft were pedals in front of each of us. A lever that resided between and just aft of us was to steer with. We pedaled for approximately an hours time. The high pitch SQUEAK, SQUEAK, SQUEAK came from the wooden blocks that we rested our feet on while we pedaled. My knees hurt during and after we returned to shore. Ruth Anne said it was a wonderful experience. She was quite hungry when we returned to shore, so we went up to the pavilion and got some food. We met Jeff one of her office comrades and his daughter Megan. We joined them for lunch and soon we were joined by Richard Danzig. Richard, who we learned later is the Under Secretary of the Navy, asked Ruth Anne numerous questions about her stay at the Pentagon. He has the same interviewing qualities as myself, direct and pointed questions. What I could find out from him was, that he is married twenty nine years as we are (married in 1966), he is originally from Manhattan in New York. Ruth Anne seems to think he is Jewish, but I am not certain, he may just be a New Yorker.

August 22, 1995 (11:32pm)

Tonight I guess I will just ramble.
I spent a lot of time on the Internet today at work mainly because of the slow work load. The damn Internet is very unpredictable. I was trying to get pictures of planets, so using webcrawler on NetScape I typed in planets and wallah, I got “Planet Hawaii”, with some phenomenally good graphics. Planet Hawaii is an informational Home Page for the State of Hawaii. I was really impressed by it and decided to print it out on the HP DeskJet 500 at my desk. Earlier in the day through stumbling around the Internet, finally fell upon the satellite image page with the world wide satellite down link and printed out the entire planet’s satellite image of the weather for 8/22/95 12:30:56. The cloud patterns for the globe were a bit strange, maybe because I don’t remember ever seeing the entire planet earth’s weather in one picture before. The second most intense clouds were lined up along the equator clear around the planet. The most intense weather patterns, as seen as massive clouds, were in the southern hemisphere, in a band encompassing Patagonia in South America to Antarctica all the way round the world. I showed my downloaded printed map to Captain Gohmann who informed me of the worst winter in history for Patagonia in South America. I wonder, is this caused from global warming; the ozone hole above Antarctica; or what? It seems that we haven’t had any rain in quite a while here in Virginia. Hedy my sister-in-law in Virginia Beach said that it has not rained in two months in her part of the Commonwealth.

Tomorrow I plan to build a bird bath so that the avian that feed in my back yard can get a drink of water without flying a half a mile to the harbor. Last weekend I began excavating the hillside behind the house to terrace it off for a garden. I plan to lay sheet plastic in the excavation and filling it with water for my fine feathered friends. I will leave the hose up there so that I can refill the small pond every evening. This is a stop gap measure until we get some relief from the drought.

August 20, 1995
My old friends the Crows showed up at 0740 this morning for breakfast. The only thing I had to offer them was black oil sunflower seeds, but the four of them were really hungry and that seemed to fit the bill. The Crows are a timid bunch and when I went to the door to greet them, they seemed very uneasy and flew off to the trees. They have good reason to be nervous of man. Some people think the Crows are their enemies and kill them. If these people would grow enough food for the birds and people there would not be a conflict. The Crows and Boat Tail Black Birds breakfast on seeds from corn and sunflowers, but also eat great quantities of insects, which are very beneficial to the farmers.

The Crows are my favorite dinosaurs. They have a tribal life similar to our ancestors the cave dwellers. The whole tribe take it upon themselves to raise the young. If a young crow is reluctant to leave the nest, the rest of the tribe will call it names and intimidate it, till it finally leave the nest. Wherever they go, sentries are posted at various positions in and around the area to spread an alarm to impending danger.