Apartment Ghost or Bathtub Filler in the Night?

An incredibly strange thing happened yesterday morning. My husband and I rolled out of bed at 9:30 am. We opened the bedroom door and heard water running in the bathroom. We ran into the bathroom in a panic, expecting to see the toilet over flowing and a lake to have formed on our floor.

But no, the toilet was not running - the bathtub was. A washcloth had gotten lodged into the tub drain and the hot water was turned on high and the tub was close to over flowing. Funny thing is, we live alone aside from our two kitties and I had gotten up around 8:30 to use the bathroom before returning to bed for a few more winks.

We immediately searched the apartment for extra people, open windows, unlocked doors, etc. Nothing. The doors were deadbolted and chained, the windows were all in place - screens intact. We checked the cats to see if they were wet, thinking maybe they had somehow turned on the faucet, but they were both completely dry.

Thinking the cats may still be the culprits I went back to the scene of the mystery. This is our faucet configuration:

The hot water is on the left and to turn the water on, you need to turn the faucet counter-clockwise. Towards the wall. If one of the cats had turned it on they would have needed to be standing where my undisturbed bottle of facewash is and put a decent amount of force into turning the water on.

I've told my husband several times before that I think we have an apartment ghost, since I've heard people in the kitchen when it was just me at home and have come out to open cabinets, the tv has turned on and off in the living room while I've been napping and the cats have stared into space and meowed at nothing. Maybe now he'll believe me, unless someone has a reasonable explanation for this.

Anyone?

Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!

Well, lions and bears anyway. Tiger Mountain, the only place to see tigers at the Bronx zoo, was damaged during hurricane Bill's travel up the coast line and is currently closed. A few other exhibits were closed the day we went as well; the Asian Monorail and the Reptile House. Over all though, we had a pleasant trip to the zoo.

We went on a Saturday, but with the weather being very gloom and doom and threatening to rain buckets at any moment, the crowd was pretty sparse. The only place we ran into a gaggle of folks was in the Congo Gorilla Forest. It had started to pour and I had put my camera away and didn't want to fight through the crowd to try to get shots, so there are no lowland gorilla photos from our trip.

We did however, get to see:

Ring Tailed Lemurs


Purple Swamp Hens


A Polar Bear


Lions


A Red Panda - not to be confused with a fox.

I bring up the fox confusion, because on a previous trip to a zoo in our area, I had been standing next to the Red Panda exhibit and in front of a 4' square sign with a photo of the panda and huge letters that read 'Red Panda'. Yet, despite all the indications of the animal's species, a family came over and the parents kept insisting to their child that the creature snoozing in the branches was a red fox.

Red foxes are native to and incredibly common in our area and look nothing like red pandas. Thankfully no one mistook the wee beady eyed panda at the Bronx Zoo for a fox or he may have launched himself out of his glass free habitat to strike.

Step Father Update

My step father went in for the biopsy on his liver this morning.

And it's benign! It's a fatty tumour that they will be keeping an eye on, but for the time being he is cancer free. They suspect that his feeling out of sorts is being caused by his galbladder, which despite probably needing surgery to remove it, is a much better outcome.

Thank you all for your thoughts, words and prayers. My family and I are feeling so much better.

A Clutch of Dragon Kin

9 baby dragons in a rainbow of colours. Made for a personal swap with another dragon obsessed crafter. I'm not so great with sculpting, but I'm really happy with these little guys.

Polymer Clay with stone and glass beads. These hatchlings measure 1" - 1.5" at their longest/tallest. I loved the personalities that came out in each of these little babies and had a hard time letting them go. But, I know their new mom will take extra special care of them!

Greetings From Asbury Park!

Let me get this right out into the open - I love all things kitschy, strange, abandoned or historic. Asbury Park, New Jersey has fit nicely into all of these categories (more or less) at some point in my lifetime. Conveniently, it's also one of my favorite places in my state and a place that I tie to a lot of memories. Also, as a point of fact, when I find something interesting, I tend to ramble about it for a while.

My first visit to Asbury happened when I was around 8. It was before my younger sister was born and was the only trip my family ever took to the Shore. My dad hated the sand, heat and doesn't swim so we only went that one time. We weren't even supposed to go to Asbury originally. My dad took a few wrong turns and that's where we ended up!

I remember it very well, we rolled into a run down town, very much in decline and drove until we saw sand. We ended up at a private beach club with a red brick building and had to pay quite a bit of money to park and get onto the beach. We were given wrist bands and my brother and I went nuts once we saw the ocean. We jumped in the surf and layed in the waves, giggled when the sand erroded beneath our feet as the tide ran out. We rode rides and walked the splintering board walk. We stayed the entire day, my permed hair (it was the early 1990's - cut me some slack) was limp and crazy and my nose was red when we left, but it was easily one of the most memorable days of my life.

The most vivid part of this memory for me, is the red brick building that marked the entrance to the beach club. I have never been able to find this building again.

I didn't see Asbury Park again until the summer of 2006. My friends and I ventured to the ruined town to see a show at the legendary Stone Pony. Why legendary? It's where Bon Jovi got their start and one of Bruce Springsteen's favourite jam clubs. (For those not familiar with New Jersey or Springsteen's history, he grew up in Asbury's more affluent neighboring town, Long Branch.) The show was alright, but what I really wanted to do was hit the streets and the boardwalk of a town that I remembered fondly, but had been run to ruins by riots, municipal mismanagements and a lack of tourism due to towns like Seaside heights and Point Pleasant boasting better boardwalk attractions.

This section of the casino is now demolished.

carousel building, boarded up

What I saw was fascinating and heart breaking. The old casino building was in ruins and obviously home to more than a few squatters. The Convention hall was closed up. The Palace Amusements building with it's smiling Tillies, symbols of Asbury Park and New Jersey in general, had been demolished. Madame Marie's fortune telling building still stood where it always had. It's neon light said 'Open' but was very clearly misinformed.

We wandered the boardwalk, layed on benches talking and played in the surf until the wee hours of the morning when the faintest hints of purples and reds started creeping across the skyline. We bid fairwell to Asbury Park.

I read up on the history of this shore town, in books and via the internet. There's a lot of information, so if you're interested in finding out what happened to this town over the last 100+ years, google is definitely your friend.

The next time I saw Asbury, it was memorial day, I was married and the town had started to take on a new face. There was construction on the Casino building, half of the building had been chopped off! There were swanky bodegas and restaurants on the boardwalk; a far cry from the boarded up dingy white store fronts I had seen 3 years before.

Construction inside the Casino. The construction zone in blocked off by murals.

The beach was filled with people, there were kids playing on the boardwalk. The Convention Hall was open, welcoming visitors into its restaurants and shops. I was ecstatic. My husband and I took a stroll down the boardwalk. This was his first visit to the shore point. He remarked that this was the most peaceful shore spot he's ever been to. There were no carnies trying to hawk over priced games of chance, no creak and groans of decade old carnival equipment. No douchebags wandering the boardwalk shoving people aside with their over inflated ego.

We ate at the WonderBar and walked Ocean Ave on our way back to our car. We passed the Stone Pony, which looked exactly as it had three years before. Ocean Ave was still fairly run down, the back of boardwalk shops coated in peeling paint, accessorized by wilted scrubby plants and sand. Overall the feeling I had when I left was hopeful. A place I held close to my heart was being restored and loved again.

We revisited again this past weekend with a friend of ours and the vast improvements since our visit in May are astounding! Ocean Ave is cleaned up, the Carousel building is being used to stage plays, we even saw someone getting married on the beach and taking photos in front of the Casino!

I'll end this lengthy post with a few more photos. Some from this weekend and a May/August shot of Ocean Ave. If you are ever in New Jersey and get the opportunity to visit Asbury, do so. There isn't much to do in the way of kitschy boardwalk entertainment, but you can get your fortune read by Madame Marie, Get summer fare and cold beers at the WonderBar, sit and relax on a quiet beach or just immerse yourself in oddball New Jersey history.

The Convention Hall welcomes visitors and is still being restored.


Flyers advertising "The Full Monty" on the doors of the Carousel Building.

Ocean Avenue - May 2009/August 2009
(same building, different directions)



If you want to see more photos of my excursions to Asbury in 2006 and 2009, pop on over to my Flickr set.

Quick Update

Thank you all for the kind thoughts and words about my step father. I don't have much of an update at the moment, but he and my mom are both in good spirits and feeling hopeful.

He has a biopsy set up for August 28, so we'll know more after that.

My Step Father

For a while now, my step father has been feeling run down and out of sorts. He's also been completely convinced that there is something terribly wrong in his lower abdomen. He went for a CT Scan today and my mom called me with the results.

He has a tumor in his liver.

They are scheduling a biopsy to determine if it is cancerous and to decide what steps to take from here. My mom is nearly hysterical with worry, my step father is in a sort of hazy state of O.K. I'm somewhere in the middle, worried, but being strong for my mom.

For now all I can do is hope and pray. Please light a candle for my step father and my mom and keep them in your thoughts or your prayers.

Earth, Sky and a Puzzle

Do you remember that shrine making kick I mentioned the other day? Well, I made another one. This time it's going to live with a wonderful crafter over in Ireland. She wanted a shrine celebrating the union of the God and Goddess and left the pairing of Deities up to me. My mind immediately wandered to the beginning and to me, the ultimate pairing of God and Goddess; The Earth and the Sky. Depending on which pantheons and lore you follow, Mother Earth and Father Sky or Gaia and Uranus, the first union of male and female after Chaos and the one that brought forth sentient life.

Created inside of a tall hinged box with acrylics, paper, foam board, stamps, moss, lavendar, cinnamon, petrified wood, sodalite, metal trinkets and lots and lots of glue.

Before you all think I've gone off the deep end with my shrine making, I've also started work on an entirely new to me project; I'm altering a puzzle, piece by piece. I can't take credit for the idea as I found it on Craftster. I found a 100 piece overly colourful Lisa Frank puzzle for $1 and have been working on altering individual pieces with paper, paint and glue. So far I have several pieces completed:

I'm doing this with no regard to how each piece actually fits into the puzzle, so when I put it together it's going to be a real adventure. I anticipate a lot of upside down and sideways pieces.

Technical Difficulties

I've been the recipient of a number of technical difficulties at home this week, coming home one night to find that my internet, cable and telephone were out.

They managed to make it out this afternoon which means I had to come home from work early. As you can tell I was gravely upset about coming home at 12:30pm on a gorgeous day! ;) Things are all fixed now, so I'm making attempts at catching up on uploads and crafty projects.

Right Now however, I want to say that I hope all of my pagan followers had a very Merry Lughnasadh/Lammas. I celebrated with an evening at the country fair with my husband. During the fair they had a hot air balloon launch, the first I've ever seen, and I really enjoyed it!

We feasted on hot dogs, lemonade, corn and fresh cut french fries. We meandered through the livestock area where I petted some baby goats and a cow and watched a woman sheer, card, and spin Alpaca fleece into yarn!

Her spinning wheel was ever-so-small, so I'm now plotting where I could put one in the apartment, all the while hearing my husband in my mind saying 'Do you need another hobby?'

Of course I do!

After the fair I had a small heartfelt ritual, after which I just cuddled on the couch with the lovely and fell right asleep. I wasn't feeling up to a long involved ritual, so I held my abridged version to celebrate the coming change in seasons and the beginnings of the Harvest.

Just to share, here is my Lammas altar set-up:

I know it's hard to identify some of the items, due to the fact that the placement of my apartment means I never have full sunlight in the area, but you can probably make out my bat shrine holding a place of honor in the center and maybe even see that the altar cloth is a a simple piece of dark cream fabric with a dark brown delicate floral pattern.

Soon I'll have those journal pages I was talking about a while ago to share, once my scanner and I stop fighting over colour saturation!