New Jersey Baby Boomer

This past weekend we had incredible amounts of rain only two weeks after a blizzard that dumped over 2 feet of snow in many places local to us here in our part of Northern New Jersey.  We are up in elevation a bit, and had more than some, and those even higher had even more.

But back to the flooding…our flooding.  We were having a fairly quiet Saturday at home, but I was nervous, because there was a LOT of snow on the mountain across the street from us, and a LOT of rain falling.  My husband set up something to divert water down the side of our house should the torrent come toward us that I told him about…he hasn’t been home for the two other times we’ve had this experience.  As evening came, I noticed the first signs that we may be in trouble, water was no longer being held back in the low spot in the woods, but was beginning to stream across the property across the street, we ate dinner, and suddenly my husband said “water is coming in under the door”, out he dashed with my son  and they spent the next approximately 6 hours keeping drains cleared and diverting water.  I have other pictures for this post, but did show some night shots of water up against our house at http://weedsandseedswap.com. Amazingly, we were able to keep it at bay, but not without a lot of stress and exhaustion, and with the help of the town DPW that was overwhelmed with problems throughout the Township. Things have cleaned up nicely, I was able to throw bedding and towels up against the inside of the door to hold water out, and as of today, all is clean and dry inside, I have no concern about mold because I’ve worked hard to do the things to prevent it…a friend did a nice post about this that you may find helpful at this link.

Sunday after we had done all the cleaning we could, we went “flood hunting”, I didn’t take as many pictures as I would have liked to, but these ones were just down the hill from us in Bloomingdale, you see the river raging past houses, some houses were partly immersed as we passed, others just up to the edge of the home…even as I stood taking the pictures, the water that you see overlapping onto the parking lot spread more and more, we left quickly, not wanting to wait and see how much area it finally covered. Only a couple of blocks away roads were completely closed due to flooding.

Here are the pictures, and my hope that all of you that have received far more damage than we have will receive the help you need.

If you use these pictures for any reason, kindly give credit to newjerseybabyboomer.com, it would be appreciated!

What happens when you don’t post to a blog regularly?  You’re seeing it here, google ranking isn’t what it used to be, number of visits declines, and you feel terrible because you know you have lots to share, but just haven’t taken the time.  I have neglected this blog, and it has so much potential!

I will try to do better.  As I type this, I know my next post is going to have some pictures that need a little editing of the flooding that we experienced here in New Jersey over the weekend, just a few local shots, so off to do that, and I’ll be right back.

I leave with a promise to post at least weekly, if not more, I do maintain several blogs on topics that interest me or I’d be here daily!

I have been hearing on the news that rental properties are reducing their prices on new leases because of the economic situation that we find ourselves in. My daughter has found this to be true…she just purchased a home, and has been trying to rent her apartment, which is beautifully situated. She had a friend interested in taking it, and the rental people offered him another apartment, the same thing, for less than her lease. Not a very nice thing to do to my daughter, but this is business.

Anyway, I was introduced to a site that might be helpful to people looking for apartments in New Jersey.  The site was encouraging New York Studio Apartments, but I thought I’d do a search in the New Jersey area, and see how low prices are. I put in the town and state of a local town, and searched for prices between $500-$700 a month, and had about 10-15 results come up within an hours drive of the area. I will say that the search wanted to keep defaulting to San Francisco, California, so when you see the results, make certain they are for the area that you’re searching for until they get the “bug” out of the site. Otherwise, it’s a very easy site to use if you are looking for a place to live in the area, and provides nice pictures to help you decide.

Sponsored, please see my disclosure policy.

It’s time to remember the birthday of Elvis Presley, his 75th.  We can only imagine what Elvis would have looked and sounded like at that age…or better yet, let him remain forever young in our memories.

I tried to dig around and see what I could find to connect Elvis with our fine state of New Jersey, this Baby Boomer remembers him well, and remembers how heartbroken some of my girlfriends were when he died.  I mean really heartbroken, you’d have thought they lost a family member or someone they knew personally and very well, when the closest they had been to him was to put together scrapbooks, listen to his music, watch him on TV, or if really fortunate, attend a concert.

Last year in New Jersey, they had the first ever Elvis look (and sound) alike competition in Rahway, NJ, here’s a video for you…these guys aren’t Elvis, but they aren’t bad either:

I was also able to find an interview…listen close, it has some rough spots, but not too bad…it was supposed done at Fort Dix in 1960:

And these are some personal favorites of mine:

Always on my Mind – not “polished”, but nice:

The Wonder of You

Can’t Help Falling In Love With You (sing along)

Amazing Grace (with picture montage)

There’s a few of my favorites. I can’t help but notice, looking at him and his pictures in retrospect, he seems unhappy, often as if he doesn’t really look well or “into” what he’s doing, but his voice was always beautiful.

As members of the Baby Boomer generation, most of us are finding our eyesight isn’t what it used to be.  In spite of the fact that there are surgeries to improve site, or contacts, I prefer wearing eyeglasses.

There was an article written at examiner.com that made me think about our own experience purchasing glasses online…you can read the post about eyeglasses right here, written by a man who lived in Brooklyn, NY.

This was an honest review sharing how he was able to get glasses at a low price, was pleased with the glasses, and shared honestly why the glasses could be obtained at great discounts.

We have purchased glasses from the same source, and the prices are great…the fact that there aren’t designer frames, which there aren’t…but they are very fashionable, does not matter to us…in the present economy, getting glasses at somewhere between $8 and $50 dollars without insurance is amazing.

We did find that when we made our first purchase, we forgot to give proper measurements for the glasses, and had to send them back and get another pair, working out a fair arrangment with the seller. It’s important to provide your PD (pupilary distance) number…something you have to obtain from an optometrist.

You pick your frames and arrange everything online, it takes a couple weeks for your glasses to arrive by mail. For more information, you may want to stop by and take a look at holiday eyeglasses and then browse about the site and see for yourself what you can get for a great price.

You may or may not have heard of Squidoo, they’ve been around for 3-4 years.  It’s a fun place for writing single page web sites about…anything…and I love it!

Just recently I did one about making Cranberry Sauce that won lens of the day, and because of it, $1000 was given to a charity I chose, in my case, Soldiars Angels, and on the same week as Veterans Day which was a nice coincidence.  Stop by and visit if you like, Cranberry Sauce – from Bog to Table.  It takes you from the Cranberry Bog where we got the berries, to home where they are made into delicious whole berry sauce using ingredients from 2 vacation locations.

I also did one that’s about our town here in New Jersey, West Milford, NJ Quiz – What Do You Know?  And the one I think I told you about before, Weird New Jersey.

In fact, if you want to stop by and see how this NJ native spends some of her time, here’s my profile page on Squidoo with all of my lenses listed…they call a web page a “lens”:-)