Merry Christmas, 2019 won’t go down as one of our favorite years to remember. There were a few ups and downs making it a so-so year. We did some quick trips this year, but no major vacation types. Hopefully 2020 will be a year we can go on a trip and really relax. 2019 did have some good things happen and some milestones accomplished. Following are a few photos to show and describe some of this year’s happening.
Our hope is that you had a good and prosperous year and that 2020 will be an awesome year filled with love, peace and joy for all of us.
Helaina’s junior year she went to the prom with her besties and had a grand time. She is now in here senior year and getting all the graduation activities taken care of like senior pictures and oh yeah, plans for college after high school. Possibly thinking of the graphic design path.May 2019 was the month for concerts, turns out we had his and her’s concerts. I went to a 3-day outdoor multi-band “Epic” event in Rockingham, NC and Sheri went to see the Sir Paul McCartney in Raleigh, NC. We’ll see if we make it to any concerts in 2020 and maybe attend the same concert together. The seventh annual County Line Gas & Oil swap meet went off without a hitch. We had the most vendors this year than any of the past shows. Hoping to keep it going and growing. Come on out Oct 30-31, 2020.In mid-November we managed to fly out to Missouri/Oklahoma to see family. I use the word “manage”, since the flights were not the most pain-free experience to put it mildly.Also flew out to Arizona a couple of times this year, sad to say they were trips to say good-bye to my dear sister DeeDee after a lengthy battle with cancer. She will be surely missed. She always had an upbeat attitude and I know she would want us to enjoy life to the fullest and carry on. And our wish for you this coming year is to carry on and have a year full of every good thing life has to offer.
I downloaded this article April 12, 2018. This was predicted to happen in 2019 and I’m posting this on August 5, 2019 and it looks like the water levels in Cape Town are doing okay at the moment. They did impose restrictions on water usage, so maybe that made the difference. Image further below is how water usage looks as of 5 August 2019, check here for water usage status
Posted April 2, 2019 — For quite a few years now I’ve been fascinated with people’s predications and if those predications actually take place or not. I’ve started saving links to these predications and my thinking is this would be a good way to follow the progress of these statements. Here’s my first post, and this one pertains to climate. I chose this one to post first since this article was making the bold statement of these events taking place in just a few months. Since this article was first posted on November 29, 2018, we should be very close to seeing if this is accurate or not.
Wishing you Good Cheer at this most Wonderful Time of the year. Merry Christmas, Dan, Sheri & Helaina, and Princess & Duchess
Once again this past year has seemed to have flown by. We did some traveling and I still have a long list of to-do projects to get done. We’ll see what we accomplish in this coming year.
2018 hasn’t been an easy year for many folks across the country and world, and our hearts go out to them. Here’s to hoping 2019 is filled with peace, joy and happiness.
Below are some photos showing a few of the highlights of our year.
2018 was one of the wettest years on record in NC. Two hurricanes came uninvited, maybe they’ll skip us for the next several years.
We put a few miles on the car driving out to Oklahoma and Missouri to visit family. We had a great time visiting. Discovered there’s a huge chigger population in Oklahoma.
On the way back to NC from OK we stopped at Memphis to take a tour of Graceland. The place sure has changed since I was last there in 1984.
Helaina and Sheri took their yearly trips to White Lake and Atlantic Beach, NC. They spot the best wildlife on their outings.
Helaina is a Junior this year at North Pitt High School. In November she celebrated turning seventeen with cake and a movie.
Some mosquito decided to transmit heartworm larvae to Duchess, also uninvited. She’s now going through treatment and supposed to be kept calm. Not an easy thing for Labs to do.
And, of course I managed to add a few signs to my collections this year.
Wasn’t I sitting here just the other day writing our year-end letter for 2016, sure seems like it. We made several long distance trips this year, most of them very quick trips over a long weekend to see family and friends. I guess those quick trips made the year seem to go by faster. Below are a few highlights of the year that we’d like to share. We wish you
a very Merry Christmas and a Happy 2018 filled with peace, joy and happiness.
Below are some photos (along with our 2017 Christmas card) showing a few of the highlights of our year.
Helaina and Sheri had a one day trip to White Lake, NC with Sheri’s mom, grandma and Helaina’s friend McKayla. They also took the usual trip to Atlantic Beach, NC.
Helaina was a “teacher” at Vacation Bible School for the first time. She helped with crafts. And did face painting at the Fall Festival.
We had some success with our garden. Cucumbers did especially well this year. Along with the garden experience Dan managed to become a statistic by contracting Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, probably while pulling weeds in the garden.
Helaina is a sophomore this year at North Pitt High School. In November she turned 16. Instead of the “Sweet 16” party she chose to go see a movie with friends.
Dan helped host the County Line Gas Show in October. The turnout and weather was great. Be sure to mark your calendars to attend the show this coming October 26 & 27, 2018 in Zebulon, NC.
Ready or not 2017, here we come. Well 2016 seems like a blur, not sure how Sheri and Helaina feel about their accomplishments this year, but I don’t feel like I got as much done as I had hoped I would. We did a little bit of traveling, some as a family and some on our separate little adventures. Without further ado, below is a smattering of photos that recap the year. We hope your 2017 is filled with adventure, fun, great health and happiness.
Below are some photos (along with our Christmas card) showing a few of the highlights of our year.
After 30 some years of driving past Kings Dominion amusement park on I-95, I finally went in and we all road some rides and ate expensive food.
In June we moved a spare house to the backyard. The plan is still to make a “man-cave” out of it to display my stuff that I’ve collected over the years.
Also in June, Sheri and Helaina did their annual trek to Disney World.
In July we had a family gathering to celebrate Mom and Dad turning 90 this year.
We went to Hershey this year, but at separate times. I went for the car show October 5-8. Back in North Carolina, Hurricane Matthew hit, so Sheri and Helaina went to Hershey the next week while the schools were closed till the flood waters receded.
Helaina made a decision to receive Jesus Christ as her personal Savior and was baptized in July.
In August Helaina began 9th grade, a high schooler. In November she turned 15 and celebrated with friends at the Painted Peacock. Maybe next year at this time we’ll be discussing her driving. On December 11th Helaina was involved in the Christmas drama at our church, her part was to play a teenager – she nailed it.
As the year 2015 comes to a close we look forward to all the excitement to come in 2016 with the upcoming Presidential election (ha ha ha). Should prove to be entertaining and kind of interesting. Speaking of interesting, 2015 was a busy year with some projects being completed and others proceeding along and some new ones being started. My big news is that after 20 years of being gone from Adams & Longino Advertising, I decided to go back to work there, and the crazy thing is they let me come back. I still have Strategic Marketing & Design going. So far I’ve been able to fulfill my obligations to my clients and appreciate the business they’ve sent my way.
With all the strife that seems to be going on the world, we hope your 2016 is filled with peace, joy, health and happiness.
Below are some photos (along with our Christmas card) showing a few of the highlights of our year.
Sheri & Helaina went to Disney World in January and then to Tennessee in October. During that time I was able to get quite a bit of firewood cut for them to help me stack when they got back home.
We had some 80+ truckloads of trees hauled off to the mill in April and May, now we’re hoping to replant soon! Looking to put in some Long Leaf pine if possible.
Took a side trip to Hershey PA., in July to pick up another Sunoco sign for my collection. While there we had to go to Chocolate World.
We shared a garden with our neighbors this year and planted a full row of family heirloom green beans. They sure do taste good.
New project here, working on moving this house to the yard in Jan or Feb 2016, whenever the rain will stop. Who needs a man-cave when you can have a man-house. And of course our post wouldn’t be complete without a photo showing Helaina’s Birthday yard sign – 14 yrs old this year.
Over the past many years of collecting “stuff”, I’ve come to the realization of a number of things. To start off with, there is no way I can collect all the cool stuff that exist. There is too much of it, it would cost too much and it takes up way too much space. So what is a hoarder to do when they’re also a sort of a neat freak? Thank goodness we now live in the digital age. We have those 1TB and greater hard drives a person can purchase for what years ago would seem like next to nothing. So I now have a collection of Andy Warhol paintings, along with Van Gogh. Hundreds of vintage movie posters along with stacks of War era posters and gobs of vintage sheet music. I can look at them anytime I feel like it. No need to travel to Pittsburgh to the Andy Warhol Museum or to Amsterdan to the Van Gogh Museum. Oh and I also have a collection of sculptures from antiquity, cool huh?
An American WW1 poster from 1917.
Granted, 2D items are much easier to collect digitally than 3D items, but I can’t afford a ’65 GTO, so having some photos of one to look at is somewhat comforting. Now with youtube I can rip the videos and save those to my hard drive and watch a ’65 GTO go down the street without a care in the world about the paint job or even the insurance.
There are a few things that I still physically collect and this digital image collecting has become helpful in that area too believe it or not. I’m finding items out there on the internet that I didn’t even know existed, but now I have it, virtually. The actual item may now be in someone else’s collection, but I now know that there is at least one out there and possibly two. I can be on the hunt for this item, asking other collectors if they have such item or seen such item and where.
Romania Postage Stamp: 1964 Olympics Figure Skating
Some stuff I’ve stopped collecting physically. Take stamps for an example, my collection is awesomely huge, but worthless. Well, maybe not exactly worthless, it comes in handy as a reference tool. So why download all these images when all one
needs to do is bookmark the page? I’ve found that over time some sites disappear, or even your internet provider goes down for an hour or so and you really need to check some detail at that very same moment. Take the Romanian stamp included in this post which came from Flickr, downloaded in 2011, will be interesting to see if it’s still there years from now. Now I don’t have to flip through hundreds of pages to find the stamp I’m looking for, I just hit the arrow button on my keyboard and scroll down through images in any given folder. If I wasn’t so busy downloading images all the time I could categorize the images by certain keywords to find them quicker, but who has time to do that?
With all these images and collections out on the internet I can’t help but wonder if the price guide books will slowly fade away? Actually I never really found the price guides of much use for the prices, they’re usually out-dated by the time they’re published anyway. I mainly used them for finding out what cool stuff existed out in the real world. Now I have Google Images for that. Speaking of which, time to peruse my collection of Alphonse Mucha prints.
That time again, time to post The Black’s year end Christmas letter. Now your
holiday’s are complete.
What can we say about 2014, the whole year seems like a blur, did we actually
accomplish much? After looking at our photos of the year, I guess we did more than I
initially thought, still 2014 was an odd year. Lots of rain this summer, wet, wet and more wet. If only we could of sent it to the people that needed it. Also during the Summer I moved my office to home, which has been an interesting transition, one that wasn’t as
difficult to adjust to as I thought it might be. Below are a few photo highlights of our
year. We hope your 2014 was full of wonderful highlights doing the things you enjoy
most and that your 2015 is filled with peace, joy, health and happiness.
We could have almost opened our own water park
A visit to the Columbus, OH zoo
A visit to the NC Aquarium. Dinosaurs invaded the exhibits this year
Helaina gave her Aunt Becky some stiff competition at the cornhole boards
Last years letter warned you this was coming. Helaina turned 13 – a teenager!!
The new addition to our family, Duchess, a Lab/German Shepherd puppy. Which isn’t much of a puppy anymore.
